Thanks to Bobby R. Ward for writing and releasing PyFLAM3, a Python wrapper around the FLAM3 renderer, which is written in the C programming language. This makes it much easier to script manipulation of flames and sheep, and would make a great foundation for a GUI editor.

The linux source distribution includes a patch to make FLAM3 generate a dynamically loadable shared object file. To apply it "cd" into the flam3 source folder, then say "patch < ..../pyflam3-0.3a/share/flam3-libtoolize.path". Unless you've used libtool before you should install it with "sudo apt-get install libtool" before you run "libtoolize ; autoconf" to complete the process. Then it's just "./configure ; make clean ; make ; sudo make install" as usual.

By default the shared object is installed into /usr/local/lib which means in order for it to be loaded you need to reconfigure ld.so or just say "export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib" before using it.

This process, and this code, is still raw but it's already useful and working and I'm very excited about where it's going.