Thanks for the tip, Pug. BTW, you write really nice tutorials!
It’s become clear during this conversation that your artistic aims are significantly different from mine. It appears to me that your current process is to work primarily within a fractal generation environment in order to create a whole host of beautiful geometry. I too was seduced by that process at first. I still find beauty in geometry and occasionally will create fractal forms that become ends in themselves, though not much of that work will actually make the cut when my new website goes live later this year.
I moved on from creating beautiful geometry years ago since it is mostly an impersonal experience in a very crowded world of them. These days, Apo is simply a tool that I use to create components that serve a much different image creation process that happens outside the fractal geometry software environment. As such, I’ve developed a work flow that can sift through a lot of raw material in a short amount of time in order to collect a few gems. Those individual flames are rendered, key-worded, and placed into a database. Later I can use those keywords to locate entire groups of flames with similar characteristics. From those I can select a handful to either be used as is, or re-edited in Apo if I need to massage them further, mostly to resize the output, or to synchronize gradients so that the selected few may be used in combination with each other and incorporated into broader imagery that isn’t much about geometry at all.
Chaotica is a really nice piece of software, but it doesn’t yet support my image crafting needs. If I had to rank the top three areas that would allow it to become useful to me, neck and neck at 1&2 would be incorporating an adaptation of Apo’s symmetry feature in the random batch creation settings, and the introduction of a robust gradient editor that allows more than just curve adjustments on the HSV parameters of a randomly chosen gradient. You might want to revisit the gradient editor in Apo for a refresher on the power and usefulness of that component. I use all of it regularly in my batch creation and subsequent massaging of individual flames. A close third would be the ability to set a random batch to only include a chosen subset of the 200+ transforms currently available in C. Oh yeah, at number 4 would be documentation of the software worthy of a $100.00 investment.
Keep on fanning those flames!