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PostPosted: Mon Aug 23, 2021 9:33 pm 

Joined: Wed Apr 14, 2021 1:49 pm
Posts: 26
I can do that, but not likely until mid-week. I'm booked out of the studio from now until end of day tomorrow. Don't know anything about Discord, so I'll be looking into that.

Happy Day


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PostPosted: Tue Aug 24, 2021 1:32 pm 
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Joined: Sat May 02, 2020 12:44 am
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Ah, I see what you're saying now. I'm not that familiar with Apophysis, so I lacked the reference point needed to understand your requests. Many of the users that come to the forum ask elementary questions, so my assumption was that your needs were basic. Obviously not the case.

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?

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PostPosted: Wed Aug 25, 2021 6:07 pm 

Joined: Wed Apr 14, 2021 1:49 pm
Posts: 26
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


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 Post subject: Re: Apo vs C renders
PostPosted: Wed Aug 25, 2021 6:09 pm 

Joined: Wed Apr 14, 2021 1:49 pm
Posts: 26
Red tabs are Apo.


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File comment: Red tabs are Apo renders
Apophysis_vs_Chaotica_Renders.JPG
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 27, 2021 10:53 am 

Joined: Tue Jul 28, 2020 12:38 am
Posts: 87
Apophysis != Chaotica when it comes to transforms. Apophysis uses different transforms entirely. When you import a flame file, it converts that on the fly to use Chaotica's equivalent transform and not every transform has a match in Chaotica. So if you're rendering flames, there are cases where it's going to be different. See my tutorials for more info. There's a way to get the same results, but depending on your Apophysis setup it may be problematic.


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PostPosted: Fri Aug 27, 2021 1:25 pm 

Joined: Wed Apr 14, 2021 1:49 pm
Posts: 26
Pugnacious wrote:
....SNIP...So if you're rendering flames, there are cases where it's going to be different. See my tutorials for more info. There's a way to get the same results, but depending on your Apophysis setup it may be problematic.


Hey Pug,
I’ve watched your tutorials, and I picked up a few new things, thank you very much!

There is a lot of crossover from Apo to C, and frankly, I much prefer the UX in C to the UX in Apo. Apo has a bit of a steep learning curve, and has always been a bit kludgy to work with, but back when I started this adventure it was all there was.

I have every version of Apo that I’ve used since 2.09. I think that’s about 4 or 5. All of them except 2.09 are various 7X versions. None of these are installer versions, i.e. I have access to all the binaries. IF one could import the .dll files that Apo uses for transforms into C, then at least I might be able to use C for rendering. It is a whole hell of a lot easier to set up a batch render in C than it is in Apo!!!!!

I still could not replace Apo with C for flame generation until at least the symmetry issue is supported, and almost equally important the ability to copy/paste gradients (pallets) from one flame to another for the purposes of color matching.

So that’s my setup. Do you have any theories on how I might proceed?


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PostPosted: Fri Aug 27, 2021 2:32 pm 

Joined: Tue Jul 28, 2020 12:38 am
Posts: 87
First off, in my opinion, Chaotica should not be a replacement for Apophysis. If they ever add features to the editor and the rest of the software, that might happen. Apophysis does things that Chaotica simply can't. In a perfect world, you should be able to design something in Apophysis and then import it into Chaotica to render and tweak. The thing is that Apophysis has some plugins that are absolutely awesome, but no analog exists in Chaotica and it doesn't know how to convert.

A friend in discord named Crystalize is working on creating custom transforms for Chaotica. One of my tutorials covers it and I have to update that one this week because he just added functionality to allow for pseudo-mandelbrot style transforms. If we knew the source code, or even just the math behind each plugin, it can likely be rebuilt as a chaotica transform. Some of them can't be done that way though. Anything dealing with 3d and most if not all of the dc plugins can't be done.

Second, I'm getting to the point where I don't really even need Apophysis anymore. I can do a lot more in Chaotica than I could before. It's not the same software, and I keep running into issues where my mental workflow is still in Apophysis mode, but once you understand how the weights (Xaos) work, and how transform chains work, you can do things that Apophysis simply can't.

Like i said before, I would need to see and understand your workflow and Chaotica might not work for you. It really just depends. What I do know is that I've changed my own workflow from software to software and it's most definitely a learning process. I feel that I'm better for the new knowledge though.

Some of the tutorials that i have in the works are as follows:

Updated custom transform tutorial.
Tutorial on advanced rendering and batch rendering.
Tutorial on the Double Bubble effect.
Tutorial on Hypertiles and Kleiniens.


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PostPosted: Fri Aug 27, 2021 3:44 pm 

Joined: Wed Apr 14, 2021 1:49 pm
Posts: 26
Hey Pug,

Basically, my workflow is like that of most others. I set my parameters for a random batch, and generate one. Browse the batch and select a couple. Then I start fucking around with the math in the GUI. :-D That process doesn’t really change from A to C.

The UX in C is both elegant in design, and intuitive to use once one understands the equivalencies/differences in cross-over parametric concepts between A and C, which sadly can only be moved in one direction. Some of the new functionality really sparks my imagination.

However, I’ve mentioned a couple times that symmetry on random batch creation and color matching abilities from one flame to another heavily inform my art. They do not seem to be available to me in C. That’s the long and short of it.

You checked out my worksite, yes?


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PostPosted: Fri Aug 27, 2021 5:15 pm 

Joined: Tue Jul 28, 2020 12:38 am
Posts: 87
I have not. Do you have a link? If you posted it in here, I've missed it.

As for symmetry, you can't generate it on random batches, but it can be done and done easily. You just need to use mirror_x and mirror_y or design it to be symmetric. Not many people that I know of actually use the random batch function at all. And I do agree that the random batch generation needs some work. What I would love to see myself is an upgraded random transform button where we can lock some of the transforms and let it randomize the rest. I think Chaotica is more geared towards people who design them instead of generating them randomly.


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PostPosted: Fri Aug 27, 2021 6:32 pm 

Joined: Wed Apr 14, 2021 1:49 pm
Posts: 26
It's there, and not too far back up the thread. Just before the last screen-cap


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