Hello, I recently discovered fractal art programs, and have decided after some looking around to give the free version of Chaotica a shot, and if I like it I will most definitely want to try the full version. I love the art others have created with it. I am the first to say absolutely I do not know what I am doing... I have searched through tutorials but I cannot find anything on starting with an empty world. I must be getting this very wrong somehow. I'm not a fan of pre-made ideas, but does one have to start out that way? I am a bit perplexed, because it is an option, what do I do to create something? I opened an empty world and added and then moved things around in the World Editor, I also tweaked the "Imaging Settings" and "Render Settings" to Width: 1124 Height: 1075. Though surely I am missing something, because it has been rendering now for 36 minutes, and the screen shows nothing, just blank. I tried a similar test where I erred and it had been going with blank results even longer... What is the deal? I hate to waste computer resources like this. My computer is more than capable, I don't understand. What am I doing wrong? To say this is frustrating is a huge understatement...

Hi, thanks for checking out chaotica!

I'm also not entirely sure what's going wrong, chaotica is normally very responsive while editing - you can also make it *really* fluid using AA level 1 while editing (then setting it back to 2+ for imaging tweaks and final rendering). One thing to watch out for is the efficiency - if it's near-zero efficiency, it means there's nothing to render in the current view - this can be due to e.g camera moved far away from the fractal, or zoomed in very deep, or if there are no transforms on the iterators (as would be the case in a new empty world).

There are some great tutorials by Tatyana Zabanova (tatasz) on deviantArt, see this thread for links and more info: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=21

Please check those out and write back if there's anything unclear. Learning to make fractal art like the pros takes quite a long time (I myself am not very good at it!), even with tutorials and hanging out in the community etc. So don't be too hard on yourself, it takes time

The facebook user group is also quite active: https://www.facebook.com/groups/chaotica/

Thanks. Hmm that is interesting. Thank you for the links! I've been checking them out. Yeah, I've messed with it some more, and I don't know what's happening. I have looked at and noted all the things I have read in the tutorials thus far to note, just to get it going, or in some other messages and queries about it. I found a slightly similar issue elsewhere, they fixed it by tweaking a few things in the Render Settings that I had overlooked at first and I did that, but still no dice... and I can't seem to find my issue... Surely I'm missing something obvious. It's also just doing like two colors, the background being one. I can't seem to cause any other color variations throughout it like I see in most of these. I don't know what I did. Unless I use a partially randomized image, the only thing that shows up is a tiny dot, barely visible on the screen. I can't edit the transforms and expect an image to show up, for me it won't work that way. When I used the randomized image, my transforms (obviously) completely disappear and I feel like a monkey...haha.

Well, 1st... Do the randoms show ok for you?
If yes, then everything is working well...

Before starting with empty worlds, i strongly recommend exploring the randomly generated worlds and the examples. Try editing them and see what happens and what each thing actually does.

Then, maybe http://tatasz.deviantart.com/journal/Co ... -519732139 and http://tatasz.deviantart.com/journal/Co ... -519706586