There are probably not many people using Gimp MathMap given some install difficulties. It is useful for making interesting maths-based animations and it would be nice to have some examples of what it can do.



Looped MP4 video is here.

Tas-mania - that is seriously good

Tas_Mania, I have not idea how you did that animation but that is wonderful!
Would love a tutorial on that!

Mathmap was my goto filter until I got G'Mic. I am so glad to be rediscovering mathmap!

Very good and interesting animation. I can visualize how it was created. I could probably do it in Aviutl (accepts math based scripts) as well.

Something similar to the peeling effect on this zipper.

Thanks Wallace, OMG, Pat625, PhotoMaster, Racer-X for your encouragement.
For me it's important to recognise the original artist. Escher was a fine draughtsman with superb detail. He also grappled with metaphysical ideas. Maybe his work and MathMap were made for each other?

Quick tutorial
I did some colouring of the original using Alpha selection>select by colour and then painting over the views outside the structure.
I copied the image twice to a new double horizontal canvass size and horizontally flipped one side so it mirrors the other.
I used Mathmap>Animation>Galactic twist for this.
It is one of the simpler animation filters with just one slider in the 'User values' box.
The 'Parameter t' slider in the 'Settings' box then determines the size of the animated 'twist' feature.
The 'twist' animation also has a mirror effect with every second twist upside down to the previous one.
I'm currently using 72 frames (layers) on my MM animations.

Doing MathMap animations.
Only MM 'Animations' filters will animate and not all of them do. They are an add-on available at the top of this page:
http://gimpchat.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=4558
The download at the bottom does not contain all the filters. I had to install in /usr/share/gimp/2.0/mathmap/expressions.
First animation
Best to use a 2:1 horizontal to vertical canvass size but it's not enforced by MM. Choose an animation filter.
Initially select 10 frames to see if the animation worked or not.
The 't' value is good for looped animations. Make the frame at t0 the same as the frame at t1 and the animation will look OK when it loops.
(MM uses the almost infinite number of fractions between zero and one )
Tick the 'Period' checkbox so that your animated loop doesn't have the same first and last frames.
Check your animation with Filters>Animations>Playback.
If it didn't work Gimp>Edit>Undo Mathmap and try again.
When happy with your animation I recommend using 72 frames because its a divisor of 360 and gives a smooth animation.

Bizarre side note. The number zero cannot be explained because 'nothing' does not exist in the universe.
The number one could be the number of universes we are in but that cannot be proven at the moment.
Mathmap mostly works between these two 'metaphysical' numbers.

Beautiful work Tas_mania, thank you for sharing. I totally agree with your comments regarding Escher.
I run GIMP 2.8 Win7 32 bit and recently had a MapMap install problem, I was given a clear and simple set of instructions by Rich2005 which can be found at;
https://gimplearn.net/viewtopic.php?t=577

Are there any instructions or tutorials on Mathmap?

Hi Pat625,
I made post #8 above into a bit of a tutorial. I only just discovered the reason for the 'period' checkbox.
It's for looped animations.
I've been working on a MM package for Ubuntu16.04-based systems because MM is broken on later Ubuntu versions.
Also MM is not being developed or even maintained by the look of it.
Check-out my comments on the numbers zero and one?

Well curiosity got the better of me. I have Win7 x64 on a VM that I never use, so I installed Gimp v2.8.22 along with MathMap v1.3.5 to try it out. I really hate running windows, but I had to to test out this filter. It seems OK from what I tried. Nothing stands out so far, but I haven't got into it deep yet...

For ages MathMap was my goto filter. I used it in creating my animated signature. It's pretty amazing what you can do with all of these filters

racer-x said
Update. I compiled MathMap on Ubuntu 17 and it also works on Ubuntu 16. It includes the extra filters. It's been tested with Gimp 2.8.22 and Gimp 2.9.7 and works well.
I uploaded it here. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByhCySqrqAmqZ3hYTW9GVlJWNE0/view

My earlier MathMap is here.
I made a package for Ubuntu 16.04LTS. This pack has the 'extra filters' included.
I could not get it to compile back then so I converted a RedHat RPM with Alien.
It's based on a 5 year old Fedora RPM converted by Alien.

You forgot step 5.

5) Make link to MathMap
cd ~/.gimp-2.8/plug-ins/; ln -s /usr/bin/mathmap

Anyway it works now, Thanks! Some things don't seem to do anything and some work well. The flag animation is simple and works well.

Thats a good test racer-x.
Your right that not everything works. This plugin needs some C++ coders.
Having to load an image before you can access the menu is a definite bug.

I was playing around with Animated Droste_Wip and found that changing the 'Expression' equation
'int NumberOfLevels: 1-20' up to 200 instantly gave me ten times more levels. I did an animation with 144 frames
which takes awhile to render but worked quite well. I don't think anyone has found the upper limits of this plugin.

A couple of more tests. Just quick tests, didn't weed out bad frame alignment.

Hi racer-x. Nice animations, especially the droste effect gif.
I experimented with going backwards when I reached the lowest level of droste and then going back to the top.
Surprising it didn't look as good as I thought it would. 2 changes instead of one could be the reason.
I suspect there is a solution to that problem - a bit like pumping water back to the top of a hydro electricity system.
(maybe use a random from the series of levels)

I thought you would be interested in this:
https://imgur.com/r/HighQualityGifs/Te0Aaoq

Somebody entered it in the reddit.com/r/HighQualityGifs competition but it's not what they are used to.

That animation you linked to is cool, no way you can do that in mathmap. Mathmap is fine for a photo editor plugin, but lacks many options to make a good animation creator. It's fine for simple animations like this however....

This is a possible solution to the problem of the Droste_wip progressing down and then jumping back up to the top of the animation series. Here is a Xaos fractal which goes down to deeper levels. Just one screen-grab is animated with droste and the frames are then reversed so the animation starts at the bottom and goes up. If nothing else people are not used to 'reverse Droste' where the animation starts in the background and progresses into the foreground.