Tool to Share - Mandelbulber to Houdini Animation Editor

[adrianmeyerart]

Hi guys, sorry for camplaining a bit about the animation system in the last days :-P

I really had to do some edits that I couldn't and editing 100s of single values in a text editor was not an option for me. Hopefully one day Mandelbulber will have a nice Animation System (-;

But till then I build a little Tool that allows full Animation Editing of Mandelbulber Animation in Houdini (-; I know not a lot of users have this Software (even though its for free wth the basic license!!), but for those who dare to give it a try, I'll share the tool.

Just prototyped it today, its working quite nicely. Going to do some cleanup tomorrow and then put it on github.

Little screenshot in advance:

[mclarekin]

cool!!

"sorry for camplaining a bit about the animation system in the last days :-P ". Not an issue, we are indebted to you for help fixing the padding problem :)

On Tue, Jul 30, 2019 at 5:46 AM Adrian Meyer notifications@github.com wrote:

Hi guys, sorry for camplaining a bit about the animation system in the last days :-P

I really had to do some edits that I couldn't and editing 100s of single values in a text editor was not an option for me. Hopefully one day Mandelbulber will have a nice Animation System (-;

But till then I build a little Tool that allows full Animation Editing of Mandelbulber Animation in Houdini (-; I know not a lot of users have this Software (even though its for free wth the basic license!!), but for those who dare to give it a try, I'll share the tool.

Just prototyped it today, its working quite nicely. Going to do some cleanup tomorrow and then put it on github.

Little screenshot in advance:

[image: mdb_anim] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/45898930/62069883-91c50900-b239-11e9-834e-7159ba69386d.JPG

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[adrianmeyerart]

Here you go. https://github.com/MeyerAdrian/mandelbulber_vfx_tools

Allows for arbitrary Keyframe or light Animation Editing from .fract Files in Houdini. Then exports back to .fract Flight Animation with per Keyframe Values.

One thing that I didn't implement yet. To visualize the Camera properly in Houdini.

I'm missing one thing there. You are storing 3 parameters for the camera animation main_camera_xyz main_target_xyz main_camera_top_xyz How can I calculate the Camera Transform XYZ and Rotation XYZ from that? What means the main_camera_top_xyz parameter? You are storing the values I need in the EXR Metadata already, so I guess should be easy to calculate. Just need that how you calculate these values so I can feed them to the Houdini Camera.

One other thing I'm still missing for this, how the camera FOV is calcualted... Asked that in detail here (last comment): https://github.com/buddhi1980/mandelbulber2/commit/b6a6c1bfbd8f93edce8e29e5549e2dfeede6bb2e

I'm going to vacation for 3 weeks now. Will post the little Tool in the Facebook Group when I'm back. Maybe someone will find it usefull.

[adrianmeyerart]

PS. I will add more Mandelbulber VFX Tools from time to time during the project. Especially when I have these new Image Layers... So thats just the start (-;

[ghost]

Thanks for the contributions! Why not add them to our repo and become a contributor? Best Regards, coast

On Jul 30, 2019, at 10:01 AM, Adrian Meyer notifications@github.com wrote:

PS. I will add more Mandelbulber VFX Tools from time to time during the project. Especially when I have these new Image Layers... So thats just the start (-;

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[adrianmeyerart]

Hey. Very welcome. Sure, wouldn’t mind that! Just didn‘t think this would be fitting so much, as the tools i‘m writing are more third party plugins. And not actually coding on Mandelbulber itself. (Which I would actually, if I was into C++. But unfortunately my skills are limited to VFX knowledge and Python and VEX scripting) They will be mostly using Nuke and Houdini. So wouldn’t know where to put my stuff. But sure, if you would like to include it nevertheless, lets do it. Maybe then it would make sense to create a „third party plugin“ or „utilities“ folder?

[ghost]

We would greatly appreciate your contributions. In general, the pattern I’ve recognized across multiple Linux projects is to include a folder in the root directory call “contrib”. Then you make a new sub folder, for example: contrib/newvfx_plugin

On Jul 30, 2019, at 3:47 PM, Adrian Meyer notifications@github.com wrote:

Hey. Very welcome. Sure, wouldn’t mind that! Just didn‘t think this would be fitting so much, as the tools i‘m writing are more third party plugins. And not actually coding on Mandelbulber itself. (Which I would actually, if I was into C++. But unfortunately my skills are limited to VFX knowledge and Python and VEX scripting) They will be mostly using Nuke and Houdini. So wouldn’t know where to put my stuff. But sure, if you would like to include it nevertheless, lets do it. Maybe then it would make sense to create a „third party plugin“ or „utilities“ folder?

— You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.

[buddhi1980]

main_camera_top_xyz is the vector which indicates direction of the top of the camera. When camera is horizontal, then it is {0, 1, 0} (top vector is parallel to y axis). Just two point: camera and target are not enough to fully describe camera orientation. There are enough to describe yaw and pitch of the camera but not roll. To rotate camera you need to move camera target against the camera. Camera always looks toward the target. To roll the camera you need to rotate top vector. It is not an easy math, but this way of defining camera guarantees very well behavior of the camera when pitch angle is high. None of directions is privileged (which is necessary with fractals). When camera is described by angles yaw, pitch and roll, there is very difficult to rotate the camera in animation when pitch is about 90 degrees.

[buddhi1980]

About camera-target approach it is very similar to this which I learned from Cinema 4D (I worked a lot with this program) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uXctw54wkY There was CameraTarget object defined in the same way as in Mandelbulber and UpVector (in camera options) which defined roll angle.

[adrianmeyerart]

thanks! I'll try to recreate that.

what is your opinion about putting my little vfx tools in the main repo? just wanna do it if you agree. will be on vacation for a bit... cya

[buddhi1980]

You can create pull request on a way how coast described. Create contrib/vfx_tool directory in root of a repository and put your code there.

[adrianmeyerart]

Done

[buddhi1980]

I wrote some notes to your pull request. You need to do very small adjustments.

[ghost]

@MeyerAdrian thank you for sharing your code!

[adrianmeyerart]

sure (-; welcome