Playing animations

While you are working with an animation, you will often want to see a quick live preview. You can 

drag the time slider back and forth to slowly preview a part of the animation in the fractal window. If 

the fractal is not too slow to calculate, you can also play a real time preview in the fractal window.

Click the Play button in the 

animation bar

 to start or stop playing a preview of the 

  animation, or click Play on the Animation menu.

While playing the preview for an animation with multiple 

layers

, Ultra Fractal gives some layers more 

priority than others. The active layer is calculated with the highest priority, and then the other visible 

layers are calculated from top to bottom, with the editable layers first. To speed up the preview, you 

can temporarily hide one or more layers.

The preview is always played at a constant frame rate, independent of the frame rate of the 

animation. Click Options on the Options menu and then click the Fractal tab to change the 

  Animation preview speed. Higher values give smoother animation, but allow less time per 

frame, so individual frames will show less detail. The best value depends on the speed of 

your computer and the complexity of the animations.

Notes

G     

Playback will not work well if the 

drawing method

 of a layer is set to One pass linear. Use 

Guessing or Multi pass Linear instead.

G     

To create a final movie clip of your animation, or to create a quick preview movie, 

render

 it 

to disk.

Next: 

Animating locations

See Also

Tutorial: Working with animations

Rendering animations

Animation

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