Animating gradients

Of course, you can also animate 

gradients

 in Ultra Fractal to create color cycling movies or subtle 

color change effects during your animations.

The gradient editor contains a small bar just above the rotation slider that shows whether or not the 

control points above it are animated. When 

Animate mode

 is on, this bar shows red animation 

indicators below each control point to illustrate that it can be animated.

To animate a control point, first set 

Animate mode

 to on and move the time slider to the 

frame where you want to create a new 

animation key

, as described in 

Creating animations

.

Now simply drag the control point around. This will record keys for both the color and the 

position of the control point. You can also type new values in the input boxes in the gradient 

editor. See also 

Editing gradients

.

As with parameters, a blue dot below a control point means that a control point is animated. It 

turns into a yellow marker if the control point has an animation key at the current frame. In this 

case, dragging the control point while 

Animate mode

 is on will change the value of the keys at the 

current frame instead of inserting new keys.

If Animate mode is off, dragging an animated control point will transform the values of all its 

animation keys. For example, if a control point animates from position 0 at frame 1 to 50 at frame 

100, and the current frame is 1 and you drag it to position 20, its position at frame 100 will change 

to 70.

The following 

gradient adjustment options

 record keys when Animate mode is on and can be used to 

create animated gradients: Randomize Custom (if Randomize control points is not checked), 

Adjust Colors, Reverse, and Invert.

The Randomize, Randomize Bright, and Randomize Misty options clear all control points and 

then generate a new gradient, so they cannot animate the existing control points.

The Copy and Paste commands work differently depending on whether or not Animate mode is on:

  Animate mode on

  Animate mode off

Copies the control points at the current 

Copies the control points for the entire frame 

  frame to the Clipboard, without any 

  range to the Clipboard, including all animation 

animation keys.

keys.

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