EDIT: I was in tatasz' thread when I posted but it defaulted to the main board. Sorry.

Hello tatasz

I am brand new to Chaotica and this forum, and since I saw your thread, I am asking my first how-to question here.

I don't know how to do anything in Chaotica so I jumped right into choosing a random word and creating an animation. I followed the tutorial and although I am not getting great results, it is working. But I am not sure how to do the following without keyframes.

First, do I have to make all editts in the world editor and in sequential order? I got confused coming back to the middle of an animation and changing parameters, then finding that the second half was lost.

My second question is this: is it possible to use the animation tool to morph one world into another by selecting the second wormd from the radomly generated thumbnails. I don't think it is because when I click on the thumbnail to select a different world, that word replaces everything although I am in the middle of the animation. In other words, clicking a thumbnail overides everything that was done in the animation editor. Am I getting this worng and, if not, is there another way to morph between worlds?

Please let me know if this is not the kind of how-to question you want. I will post in the main forum if that is the case.

Thanks a lot.

rem

Every change you apply will change roughly the whole span between 2 closest keyframes for that parameters (can be more depending on what you are doing), because chaotica interpolates between created keyframes - so whatever you do between 2 existing keyframes will affect the interpolations and, as result, all the frames.
So, for example, if you set a keyframe for a value x=0.1 at frame 100, and another one for x=0.5 at frame 200, and then go to frame 150 and change x, all span between 100 and 200 will be affected.
1. keyframes are set individually for each edited parameter (for example, if you edit the weights, it will not set a keyframe for shaders, only for weights)
2. the order you implement the changes does not matter. If in the example above you first edit at frame 200, then 150, then 100, or first 100, then 150, then 200, the result will be the same.


No, it is not possible.
Although morphing worlds is doable, it is not trivial and imho you shouldn´t worry with it right now, but rather just learn the software mechanics, weights, transformations, etc.

Ah, last but not least, while morphing is technically doable, it has very high chances of looking bad as its rather hard to control (unless you introduce some intermediate step which is very blurry for example to hide the ugly parts) - anyways its insane amount of work

Thanks a lot. I couldn't work it out just playing around: I suppose it will be easier to visualise when keyframes are visible (which I believe I read was not yet the case but planned for update?)

Yeah unfortunately there's no visual keyframe editor yet, one of the big missing puzzle pieces!

Sorry for this inconvenience

I'm not complaining!. It's a beautiful piece of software. And it's good to have something new to look forward to.

Thanks Hopefully next versions will suck less!