Two quick recipes for animated blinking stars in Chaotica.

In this tutorial, I will always use FPS 10. To get the frame numbers for FPS 30, just multiply the given values by 3.

For this tutorial, you will need Chaotica 1.5.2 or above (check website).

Adding the Stars

First, lets add the stars. In the World Editor, add a new iterator. Then, add a new transform to it and replace linear with a small amount of noise:



The amount of noise will change the size of the stars:

1 - Blink by changing the noise amount

Lets say we want our stars blink once a second. This means we will need 2 keyframes a second: the star will need to get big and then back to small in one second.

So, at time 0:



The amount of noise will be 0.005 for example:



Now, lets add a keyframe. 2 keyframes a second means 1 keyframe every 0.5 second. Move the slider to the right till you reach the right time (you can also input the frame number: 0.5 * 10fps = 5).



Switch to the editor and increase the amount of noise:



Advancing more 0.5 second, to frame 10, we need to reduce the amount of noise back to the original value, 0.005. And then repeat it all until the end of the animation:

Time        Frame        Noise amount
0                0                0.005
0.5             5                0.1
1                10              0.005
1.5             15              0.1
2                20              0.005
2.5             25              0.1

The result should look like this:



You can achieve a similar effect by scaling the post affine up and down.

2 - Blink by changing the weights

Changing the weights also produces a blinking effect.



Lets do the same we did in 1, but changing base weight of the iterator which contains our stars instead of noise amount. Something like this:

Time        Frame        Base weight
0                0                0.02
0.5             5                0.2
1                10              0.02
1.5             15              0.2
2                20              0.02
2.5             25              0.2

You will get something like this: