Some useful hints and tips

• To view a pattern file just drop it onto the Ready app, or onto the rendering window if the app is already running.
• Rendering complex scenes can be quite costly, so to increase the speed you can turn off the displacement mapped surfaces, and turn off the display of multiple chemicals. See the Render Settings in the Info Pane.
• For maximum speed, use Change Running Speed... in the Action menu to increase the number of timesteps between each render. Fewer frames will be drawn, and the overall speed will be faster.
• The patterns in the "CPU-only" folder typically run much slower than the others, if your graphics card is reasonable. So for better performance you shouldn't use them. (If you don't have OpenCL installed or you're in a virtual machine then only the CPU-only patterns will work.)
• Any image-based reaction-diffusion pattern (vti files, not yet the vtu mesh ones) can be changed in size using the dimensions control in the Info Pane. If you want the size of the stripes and spots to grow then usually some of the parameters must be altered. Some examples:
  • With GrayScott1984/Pearson1993.vti there is an explicit parameter for scale, dx, which is used in the computation of laplacian_a and laplacian_b. If you double the size of the pattern (to 512x512x1), you can set dx to half (0.004883) to get the same size of stripes as the original. For numerical stability at the new size, change timestep to 0.3.
  • There is no dx parameter in GrayScott1984/U-Skate/Munafo_glider.vti but you can add one using Add Parameter... on the Action menu. Set it to 0.8 to make the glider bigger. Going larger still will need you to increase the pattern dimensions and to reduce the timestep. This combination works: 256x128, dx=0.5, timestep=0.5.
  • The initial pattern generator (that draws the rectangles in that example) works relative to the size of the image, so changing the ratio of height to width affects how it works. Notice that you need to keep the dimensions in approximately the same ratio for the glider to work.
• To make a video, use the command on the File menu: Start Recording... to produce a sequence of images. Then use your favorite utility to make a video file. For example in FFmpeg the following command makes a high quality MPEG-4 video at 50 frames per second:
  ffmpeg -r 50 -i frame_%06d.png -vb 5M -vcodec libx264 video.mp4
• To make an animation of meshes, use the command on the File menu: Start Recording... and select '3D surface' as the image source. With the filename extension set to .obj or .ply, you can then use the Stop-motion-OBJ add-on in Blender to import the files. (And if you want to use the vertex colors then choose the .ply format.)
• If your 3D mesh resolution is too low, use an external tool like MeshLab to subdivide it before importing into Ready.
• ParaView can load the output of Ready (vtu and vti files) and has lots of filters to try. A method for making wrinkly rabbits was discussed here.