Pugnacious said: “…batch rendering is possible it just takes a little fiddling.” All it took was this suggestion and I went digging to find that ability which of course is well hidden and not documented. Thanks for the hint.
“There is also a way to get gradients to work in Chaotica.”While I suspect that might be true, what I discovered after learning how to batch process my Apo Flames in C, is that the C rendering engine while fast and elegant, doesn’t properly render most of my flames the same way that Apo does. I didn’t’ notice this before since I was looking at individual flames here and there from my database and nothing seemed to be terribly problematic. However, I set up a test and created a random batch of flames in Apo, made no adjustments to them, and then rendered them out to PNGs. Then I batch rendered the same group in C and was shocked at how poorly they matched the originals. I’ll post up a screen cap showing the relative differences. It is obvious to anyone who looks at my results that C is not reading all the parametrics in the Apo flame files, or at least is not supporting quite a number of the x64 transforms available in Apo. That seems odd since many of the transform names in Apo are the same as the transform names in C. Obviously the parameters are different.
Since now I can’t trust that C can render my Apo flames accurately regardless of the gradient issue, and also there is no way to invoke bilateral, rotational, or dihedral, symmetry in random batch generation, the entire application is pretty much a waste of $100.00 for me.
I’m sure that it holds value for a number of other people, but it seems to me that the boys at Glare Technologies spent most of their time on perfecting a render engine, while only taking away a few ideas from Apo. It has much of the look of Apo, but doesn’t have the chops to compete with it. The result as I said is a great, (though staggeringly overpriced), introductory application for fractal flame creation by folks that don’t have experience with a more powerful and robust flame generation environment.
That is a shame, since fractal flames are a wonderful and organic niche group of IFSs that are mostly overlooked in the world of fractal art.
I’ll post the screen cap in the next post. I don’t want the file size to screw up the post again like last time. d/l it and look at it offline on a decent size monitor if you want to see the details better. The original Apo renders have a red tab. The C renders are adjacent to them.
Reblandon wrote:“
Regrettably, Chaotica is poorly supported with only limited public interest from the devs. Now I am curious as to what sort of work you have been producing. Do you have a link you could share?” Limited public interest from the devs? Try no interest at all, or at least that’s been my experience. It’s been a week since I posted my first question, and not a peep from them yet? They may be render gurus, but they have a lot to learn about streeting and supporting an application at this price point.
I do have a website, but it was only created as a test bed to try out a few ideas, and has never been marketed. Consequently it gets almost no traffic. Currently my primary business website is under re-development, and the content from the fractal site will be folded into that in a couple months once it’s been tested.
Here you go:
http://www.8chg.com