Create Free Unique Cool Screensavers - Electric Sheep Fractal Generation Quickly

Creating Unique Sheep:

Once you have found two sheep which you believe would be good, go to the 'genome' section of the sheep and download the 'file' and save it with the extension '.flame'. This is the standard for rendering sheep. Open the two sheep that you have saved with notepad or some other word processing tool and add the code from the second sheep straight after the code from the first sheep into a single '.flame' file. This new file is an edge which when animates will transform from the first flame to the second flame in a quite a unique and mostly stunning way. (Some sheep do however not go well with each other and sometime render to be horrible or sometimes not work, however not that often.)

Animating Fractals:

As with any visual editing, it does require some computer power to generate sheep at any decent rate. There are methods which are very time consuming and quite a hassle such as rendering each frame individually in a command console then using a separate program to create a single animation out of the pictures. I initially tried this and to generate decent flames required 20mins for each frame on a 1680 x 1050 resolution with only a quality of 50.

However I discovered a program called Flam4 which utilised NVIDIA CUDA technology to reduce the 20mins at 50 quality per frame to 5 seconds at a quality of 500. Not only does this generate the frames but also creates an avi video output at the required file size you would like. v0.66 is the latest as of the 2nd of June. (Flam4 requires a NVIDIA GPU which supports CUDA and most GeForce cards should cater for this. Mine is a 9800 GTX+ with a 3.96GHZ E8500 OC.) http://sourceforge.net/projects/flam4

Settings I Use: Resolution 1680x1050, Quality 500, Frames: 160, FPS: 30, BitRate: 6000000

Just generated an entire sheep of the above specification in around 8 minutes. (Decreasing the resolution and quality decreases the time to render frames. Decreasing bitrate and length of sheep decreases file size.)

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