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Tevaris

My personal favorite

Also available in these formats:

• 5.8 MB WMV 320x240 15 fps 240 kbps

  This file can stream into Windows Media Player in real time usually.

• 11.3 MB WMV 320x240 15 fps 500 kbps

  Moderate quality at a reasonable file size. If you have a very fast high-speed connection this can stream in real time.

• 87 MB MP4 640x480 30 fps

  This is the recommended super-high-quality file to download. This is a 4 Mbps MPEG-4 file. It is about half the size of the previous MPEG-2 file and actually looks better, so the MPEG-2 file is obsolete. Still, if you want to download the MPEG-2 file, perhaps for comparison purposes, scroll down to the bottom of this page.

This is certainly my favorite of all the animations I've created so far. It is also one of the longest, and has the second-highest frame count.

Tevaris features a wonderful piece of music titled "Wasteland" by Technetium and is the first of my animations I felt deserved such great audio accompaniment.

Here are some thumbnails of the animation sequence. Click on one for a 640x480 JPG file.

Tevaris is a modestly deep zoom with a beautiful palette of creamy white color gradients blending with greens, blues, gold, and subtle bronzes. It shows that you don't have to go to extreme zoom depths to have something really nice. The real art here is selecting what you zoom in to so that something beautiful emerges.

There is a funny slight zoom-out effect at the beginning. This is an artifact of the way I used to calculate the zooming path and speed. It's hard to explain, but basically there were limits on how fast something can zoom in, so if the zoom is too deep and the number of frames too small, sometimes the only way the zooming algorithm can comply is by flying backwards before it flies forwards. My new method of path calculation avoids this.

This was mainly developed as a test of the frame interpolation method, and it was a real success (although I felt somewhat guilty about it...). Some artifact of the interpolation process is visible as a slight twitch in some pixels as the rendering switches to a new key frame about once a second. This is subtle and doesn't really stand out in the highly compressed 320x240 files but is clearly visible in the larger higher-quality files. Otherwise, this animation is totally gorgeous. I will continue descending into the central mini-brot in the near future. I also have a plan to smooth out the key frame twitch.

The name "Tevaris" was inspired by something that came out of a random word generator (along the lines of Magritte's "The Unexpected Answer"). I have since learned it is a given name...sorry.

I originally named this animation "creamy" but decided that sounded dorky. Some have commented that this animation looks like wheat, although I was unable to convert that feedback into a useful title. (Cream of Wheat? Wheaty?) 

This is the old MPEG-2 file. If you want a high-quality download, I strongly recommend the MP4 file above.