Cinematic Motion:
Animation Maker, Keyframes & Batch Rendering
Turn still fractals into seamless fly-through videos: keyframe interpolation, bezier smoothing, batch rendering, and tiling for ultra-high resolution.
Quick Answer: Open Animation Maker, insert keyframes captured from the main window or Navigator, choose bezier interpolation for smooth motion, preview the flight path, then batch-render the frame sequence. Almost every parameter — including lighting — can be animated.
Step 1 — Plan Your Flight Path
Great fractal animation starts with a great path. Use the 3D Navigator to scout: fly through your scene and note 3–5 “hero” viewpoints — a wide establishing shot, a dive into a tunnel, a close orbit around detail. These become your keyframes.
Keep motion slow. Fractal detail rewards lingering cameras; fast moves turn intricate geometry into mush. For a 10-second clip at 30 fps you need 300 frames — plan for it.
Step 2 — Insert Keyframes
Open Animation Maker. Position your scene in the main window (or Navigator) at the first hero viewpoint and insert a keyframe from the current parameters. Move to the next viewpoint, insert again. Frames between keyframes are calculated by interpolating all values.
To tweak a single keyframe later: load its parameters back into the main program with the button above the keyframe, adjust, then write them back with the button below it. Nearly everything — formulas, camera, even lighting — interpolates.
Choose bezier interpolation for smooth, cinematic easing between keyframes (linear works for mechanical moves). One subtlety: with bezier, the exact keyframe values are not always hit — the path rounds through midpoints. To force the animation to start and end exactly on your first/last keyframes, duplicate the first keyframe and set its subframe count to zero, and do the same at the end.
Step 3 — Preview Before You Commit
Use the preview to watch the flight path before rendering a single final frame. Check for jarring speed changes, collisions with geometry, and moments where the camera stares at nothing. Fix the path now — a 300-frame render is the wrong time to discover a bad cut.
Step 4 — Batch Render & Tiling
Set your output folder (keep the path under 255 characters — longer paths fail to save in the .m3a project file), resolution, and frames-per-keyframe, then start the batch. If a render is interrupted, ‘Start with index’ resumes from the last completed frame — leave the file-index values untouched.
For ultra-high-resolution output, use Big Render tiling: the image is rendered in tiles and stitched, bypassing memory limits — essential for 4K/8K stills from a 32-bit application.
Step 5 — Post-Production
Assemble the frame sequence in a video editor (Blender’s free VSE works fine; After Effects/Premiere for pro pipelines): color grade, sync to music, add subtle film grain. Export depth passes (Z-buffer) from MB3D if you want depth-of-field or fog in post — far more flexible than baking it into the render.
Pro tip: render a low-resolution draft of the full sequence first and watch it end-to-end. Ninety percent of animation mistakes — pacing, framing, dead moments — are visible at 480p and cost minutes instead of hours to fix.
Want your renders as real 3D objects? Continue with 3D Export Masterclass — or browse all tutorials.
Frequently Asked Questions
Linear or bezier interpolation — which should I use?
Bezier for anything cinematic — it eases in and out of keyframes naturally. Linear only for deliberate mechanical moves. Remember that with bezier the path may not pass exactly through your keyframe values; duplicate the first and last keyframes with zero subframes to pin the endpoints.
My animation render stopped halfway. Do I start over?
No. Note the index of the last finished frame, set ‘Start with index’ to resume from there, and keep the file-index values as they were. The sequence continues seamlessly.
How do I make a perfectly looping fractal animation?
Make the last keyframe identical to the first (copy its parameters), so the interpolation returns to the starting point. Keep camera speed constant through the loop point to hide the seam.
Can I animate lighting changes during a flight?
Yes — nearly all values interpolate, including light position, color, and intensity. Keyframing a light sweep through a tunnel is one of the most dramatic effects in MB3D animation.