Playing around with adding time series animation capabilities to FRELLED, my Blender-based FITS viewer (http://www.rhysy.net/frelled-1.html). This is a simulation of a star-forming cloud. I really don't know any of the details of the simulation; at this stage my interest is purely visual.
There are only 29 frames, but this required rendering 7,424 images. FRELLED renders everything in 3D by slicing the FITS file. In this case the simulation is a cube 128 elements on a side. Since the viewpoint is fixed, it only needs to slice the cube in one direction, but that's still 128x29 images. This has to be doubled to generate separate transparency and colour maps. Actually the rendering time wasn't too bad, maybe half an hour.
If I rendered the viewpoint rotating around all three axes of the cubes for 100 frames, that would mean rendering 76,800 images. That would be nearly an hour of footage if they were compiled into a simple frame-by-frame animation. :)
