Fractorium and “Cross” Variation Tutorial

General :

This tutorial was written for Fractorium. Though I am fairly sure the general concepts will work in a similar as well, the steps below contain specific instructions on what to do in Fractorium. The purpose of this tutorial is to provide some practice to new to Fractorium (and fractal flame editors in general) by walking through a creative that uses the "cross" variation as its main . The only software you need to install to be able to follow this tutorial is Fractorium, no other resources are needed.

The interface on your screen is probably coloured differently than my screenshots but this has no effect on the capabilities of Fractorium. Fractorium offers the possibility to modify the of the . If you would prefer a darker UI (like in the screenshots), here is how to do it.

Fractorium uses the decimal separator that is used by the language of your operating . Since the tutorial is in English I am using periods here, but when you in or values from here, you will have to use the decimal separator used by the language of your operating system.

Important!

If this is the first you run Fractorium, please through the content on this . Especially the hardware requirements and the part about enabling the GPU since it can provide a substantial speed gain (especially important during editing). The personal experience of course, depends on the computational capacity of your CPU and of your GPU.

UI Layout Customization

The level tabs can be detached, dragged and docked different locations to allow you to work comfortably and effectively.

To do this, click on the header bar of the given and dragging it while holding down the left .

Try moving them toward the left and right edges of the screen or to the upper, lower, left or right edges of of another panel. If you’re in a position where the dragged panel can be docked, Fractorium will display a blue rectangle indicating the area where the panel will be docked after you released it. If you want two or more panels to occupy the same space, drag one over the other until it receives a blue tint and then drop it. You will be able to switch between them by clicking on tabs like in the original layout.

Here is an example for a customized layout:

Important!

If this is the first time you run Fractorium, please read through the content on this page. Especially the hardware requirements and the part about enabling the GPU since it can provide a substantial speed gain (especially important during editing). The personal experience of course, depends on the computational capacity of your CPU and of your GPU.

Getting Started

After you have launched Fractorium, click on New Empty Flame in the menu. Click on Copy Xml in the Edit menu, then click on Xml Over also in the Edit menu. This way the random-generated flame Fractorium opens with will not be a part of your file.

You should see a monochrome square now. If it appears to be too dark, click on the Palette tab then click on the Random Palette button until you get a bright square. The colour doesn' really matter; as long as it's bright it will do in the beginning of the creative process in general. However, for the sake of this tutorial please set the palette cl-tans-yellows-browns as the active one. Just copy its name from here to the search field above the list of palettes then click on the colour gradient.

Tip:

Click on the Xforms tab then click on the Affine tab. Put a checkmark in the Pre Affine Transform and the Post Affine Transform checkboxes, and in the Show box choose Current for both the pre and post affine transform. This way only the affine controls of the active xform will be displayed, and the area will not become crowded.

Creating the Base

Open the Xforms tab and click on the Add Xform button three times.

In the Xforms page click on the Select tab then click on the Select All button to select all 4 . This way the changes you (.g. adding a variation or dragging an affine control) will affect all xforms instead of affecting only the active xform. (With the chekboxes you can choose xforms you want selected. This is a very useful function for having control over given subsets of the xforms.)

Click on the tab on the Xforms page and change the value to 0.725 in the field above the colour gradient. At this point this does not have any significance; I just want to make sure that you see what I see. Now let's add the cross variation to the xforms. On the Xforms page, click on the Variations tab. Type "cross" in the search field at the top of the Variations page.

Click on the to the cross variation and either increase it with the up arrow, use the mouse wheel or just type in 1.6 to

change the value.

You can also change values in Fractorium by right-clicking on them and moving the left or right while holding down the right mouse button.

Tip: In Fractorium, you can set a value to 0 by double-clicking on the field that contains it; double-clicking on a 0 will change the value to 1.

Now to create a -looking pattern by playing with the pre and post affine controls.This can be done in two ways (I almost always use the combination of the two). Mouse: The circles in the preview area are the affine controls. If you click on the dot in the center, they can be dragged until you release the mouse button. If you click on the outer dots, you can rotate and resize them. If you click on one of the outer dots while holding down the Alt button, you can skew them. Parameters: To access the affine parameters click on the Affine tab on the Xforms page. These can be used for very or big but very accurate changes.

The values marked in red are the steps by witch the affine control will be rotated, shifted or resized when you click on the corresponding button. You can type in very small values instead of the default ones to allow for accurate

changes.

Basically, you can play around with the affine controls in the preview area and if you something interesting (this can be a long process) you can fine tune it with the parameter controls. Tip: Here is what to do when you find some pattern that you like and you want to keep it but you also want to keep searching to see if you can find others. Click on the second from the left on the toolbar (if you the cursor onto it, the text Add a copy of the current flame to the end of the current file will appear). A new flame (thumbnail) will appear in the list on the page. Fractorium will keep updating the recent one as you work on it and the state you wanted to preserve will be safe in the flame in the list. After this operation, only the active xform remains selected so if you want to get back to exploring the way you did, you will have to select all xforms again as described above. If you to delete flames from the Library page, click on their thumbnail then press Shift + Delete.

Tip: Dear Reader, if you belong, like me, to the group of people cannot foresee the future, I recommend the shameless overuse of the Save function: In the File menu, click on Save Entire File as Xml to save to a file all the flames you have preserved so far on the Library page or click on Save Current as Xml to save only the currently active flame to a file. So, after you entered the parameters you should see something like this in the preview area:

Let's jump a bit into the future by which time you will have already created and saved some handsome scenes and you are on the verge of insanity for not being able to choose between them. Now take a nap, drink a coffee or do some work if absolutely necessary; deciding will be easier after this. Let's say that you’ve chosen the following:

Post Affine Transform: Pre Affine Transform: Please copy these

0.999594 0.003489 -0.719153 -0.019640 into the yellow-marked

-0.003489 0.999594 0.019640 -0.719153 fields as shown above. 1.853340 0.058937 0.000000 0.000000

This pattern could have been created by using only one xform; the other three will come in handy for colouring

purposes later on.

Ok, now let's smear some rough details. There are many ways one can apply blur to a scene; here is a very simple one: First go to Xforms > Select and click on the Select None button. Then make Xform 1 the active xform (if it isn't already) by clicking on the small coloured square on the Xforms tab and then choosing the first item from the drop-down list.

You can use the function keys as well to switch between xforms.

After this go to Xforms > Variations and type sineblur in the search field. Change the value of sineblur to 0.0004. If you double click on the name of a variation its editable parameters will appear. In this case change the value of sineblur_power to 0.75. This provides a noticable blur effect in the scene just where we need it and leaves the rest pretty much untouched.

Note: Most variations are available as pre and post variations as well. There is an article about what they are and how they work at the website of Fractorium, but that's a rather in-depth material. If you are not familiar with them, I recommend that you take a look at this well-written and easy-to-digest quick tutorial by tatasz.

Our pattern is getting quite handsome but it is still a bit boring. To change that, we will warp it to make it linear and we will try to slap some colour on it.

Creating the Composition

We will use a final xform to warp the of the scene. On the Xform page click on the Add final xform button.

On the Variation page delete the search phrase 'cross' from the search field. The first variation in the list will be the linear variation; change its value from 1.0 to 0.

Now we shall add some variations to start with. As you can see the amount of possibilities is vast; if I wanted to discuss them all, I would need to take proton decay into consideration. Even a quick overview of what approaches to take and what combinations work best would be beyond the scope of this tutorial and also my knowledge. So I'll just present a combination that works here if the parameters are right. Let's add the bipolar, pre_ejulia and post_polar variations. Scroll down to find them or type their names in the search field and change their values from 0 to the following: bipolar = 2.95 [bipolar_shift = -0.5] pre_ejulia = 1.0 post_polar = 1.0

Since we are about to create a more or less final appearance, this is a good time to set the image size. Click on the Flame tab then change the Width and Height values in the Geometry section. Of course, you can type in numbers freely to give your image the aspect ratio you want but for now let's set the width to 1280 and the height to 800.

Tip: If at some point you want to the preview area to your screen size again, you can do that by double-clicking the Width and Height values. Whenever you adjust the size remember that render time will increase with the resolution.

Now you should see something like this in the preview area:

Let's position the image in a way that will allow us to see better what we are doing. Three actions can be used for this: Magnification: Move the cursor over the preview area and use your mose wheel to scale up/down the image, or change the Scale value in the Geometry section on the Flame page, or click on the preview area with the right mouse button and move the cursor away from the center (scale up) or towards the center (scale down) until you release the mouse buttton. Rotation: Click on the preview area with the right mouse button and move the cursor circularly around the center of the preview area until you release the mouse button, or change the Rotate value in the Geometry section on the Flame page. : Click on the preview area with the middle mouse button and hold it down while you move the cursor in any direction. As an alternative, you can change the Center X and Center Y values in the Geometry section on the Flame page.

Let's set the Scale value to 810 for a start. You can modify how the pattern is warped with the Pre Affine Transform of the final xform (by using the methods described in "Creating the base"). At first, the pre and post affine controls will overlap each other in the preview area but the pre affine control is the "upper" one so you can just click on one of the dots and start moving it.

Tip: The area in wich you can move the control dots is delimited by the edge of your screen and, in many cases, this can bar you from discovering some interesting structures. Fortunately, this can be remedied. Go to Xforms > Affine and remove the chekmark from the Lock Affine Scale checkbox. Now you will see that the control circles in the preview area will shrink with the scene if you scale it down (as described above, under “Magnification”). This means that the area of your screen now represents a larger area in the space of the affine controls and you have greater freedom playing with them. Of course you probably won't be able to see much of the scene right now so put the chekmark back in the Lock Affine Scale checkbox and scale up the scene. This time the affine controls will remain small. The shortcoming of this method is that if you drag a control dot too far out, you may not be able to interact with it when you scale up the scene, and thus, you'll have to perform fine adjustment with the parameter controls on the Affine page. Altough, there is a workaround for this as well: Let's say you set the image size to 1280x800 previously and you have found and interesting pattern but you had to move one of the affine controls out of the displayed area. If you want to perform fine adjustment on this affine control with your mouse, change the image size to 3000x2000, for example, or to whatever is necessary to get the affine control within the preview area again. Now use the scroll bars under and to the right of the preview area to navigate to the part of the image where the affine control is. down or memorize the Center X and Center Y values in the Geometry section of the Flame page. After this, the preview area, as described above, and move the center of your scene to the affine control you want to adjust. Now you can scale up the scene or use the procedure described in the first part of this tip as necessary. When you are done with the adjustments just set the image size back to what it was (1280x800) and type in the Center X and Center Y values that you wrote down previously.

Ok, if you are still here after the "short" tip, let's continue. Let's say that you decided to use the following: -14.992000 5.546890 Please copy these numbers into the six fields in the upper part of -2.306990 -16.905701 the Pre Affine Transform box on the Xforms > Affine page after 13.524300 -4.848040 you have selected the final xform as the active one.

Intermezzo

At this point you should be looking at something like this:

There might be several points in a creative process where: - you may want to review certain minor details that you have already made a decision about; - it can be worthwhile to change some settings from their default values; - you may want to re-position the scene.

Practice is needed to make a good guess on what to try and when, and they are also highly dependent on personal preferences. In this section, I'll give you some examples of these.

Quality

This parameter can be found in the Iteration section on the Flame tab. Though the default Quality value (30 for GPU rendering and 10 for CPU rendering ) for the preview render is adequate for editing most of the time, in some cases, certain areas may get streched or changed in a way that their preview appearance is not detailed enough anymore for you to decide whether you like them or not. Increasing the Quality will increase the render time; you will have to find the right value you can work with for each new artwork. Quality is 30 for the upper picture and 800 for the lower.

Weight

You may find some parts of the scene too pronunced, these can be weakened by lowering the weight value of the appropriate xforms.

The = button next to the weight value lets you set an equal weight to all xforms.

For example, the effect of the sineblur we added earlier to xform 1 may look too much. So let's set the value in the red rectangle above to 0.05 (Weight field under the xform selector on the Xforms page). The result should be something like this.

Brightness

As you keep forming your scene, from time to time certain areas may become so bright that you will hardly be able to see what's going on there. I mostly use the following to deal with these: the Brightness and Gamma values in the Color section on the Flame page and the Brightness palette parameter on the Palette page.

Tip: In many cases it is easier to find the right settings if you the continous transition of the scene when changing the parameters. All parameter values in Fractorium can be changed in small or large steps (in addition to typing in the exact value). For example, click in the value field of the Gamma parameter in the Color section of the Flame page. Hold down the Shift key and make a movement with the scroll wheel of your mouse. From now on Fractorium will change this value in small steps; if you hold down the the Up or Down arrow keys, you will see a slower, more continuous transition of the scene. If you want to use the large again, hold down the Ctrl key and make a movement with the scroll wheel of your mouse.

So let's set the Brightness to 0.55 and Gamma to 3.6 on the Flame page, and the Brightness to 7 on the Palette page . Now the center of your scene should look like the picture on the right below.

.

In addition, our options are widened by the graphical curve control on the Palette page. To enhance the contrast click on the Palette tab and find the curve control at the bottom:

Grab the little dots at the ends of the diagonal (marked with red) and move the lower one upward by about one quarter of the small squares and the upper one downward by about two thirds of the small squares. You should have something similar to the lower picture.

Filter

Sometimes you may want to have sharper, crisper or smoother, blurrier edges, the section on the Flame page let's you control just that. The most important values here are Spatial Filter Width and Spatial Filter Type. The settings that look best, produce nice, sharp edges or nice, smooth edges vary from scene to scene; experimentation cannot be avoided here (luckily Fractorium does not start the rendering over after a change of these values, thus the changes are easy to percieve and the right values can be found pretty quickly). For instance, the pictures below show two examples that are bit outside the range that produces nice-looking images in case of the current scene.

On the left: Spatial Filter Width = 0.7 , Spatial Filter Type = Lanczos3 On the right: Spatial Filter Width = 1.2 , Spatial Filter Type = Gaussian

For now let's just make the image a bit sharper than the default by setting the Spatial Filter Width to 0.8 and the Spatial Filter Type to Mitchell.

Depth Blur

All the settings that can interact with the depth blur effect (except for the variation parameters of 3D variations) can be found in the Geometry box on the Flame page.

Depth Blur creates a effect by blurring parts of the scene that are closer or further from your viewing point than a certain focus point. Unless you add 3D variations to your scene everything happens on a two dimensional plane. This plane is by default parallel to the viewing plane (the screen of your monitor) so the Depth Blur doesn't have much effect in this case. However, the plane can be tilted which means that a depth of field effect can be added to two dimensional scenes as well. Sometimes (definitely not always) this can produce some nice, interesting results. The Pitch value can be used to set the of the , the Z Pos value can be used to have some control over the location of the focus area (where the scene stays sharp) and the Depth Blur controls the strength of the effect. For now, please set the following values: Z pos = -0.08 Perspective = -0.21 Pitch = 30 Depth Blur = 0.280

Repositioning

When you make significant changes to a scene always try out different views by rotating and panning or even scaling the preview area. This can proove very useful, for example, the previously added Depth Blur may seem nice but it's certanly nothing special. However, if you set the following values in the Geometry section of the Flame page: Center X = 0.05 Center Y = -0.22 Scale = 1210 Rotate = 173 then you should see the following result:

Now, either I dragged out this tutorial too long and I started to hallucinate or we managed to create the illusion of some protruding ridges by: playing with the contrast, setting the filter values to gain the needed sharpness for the depth of field effect, applying a suitable amount of depth blur to the right place and finding a suitable viewing position.

Colouring and Details

Ok, first I have to apologize. What we've created so far suited this tutorial very well but it belongs to the most hard-to-colour flames I've came across with. If you want to see how it's done (or rather how I do it) please skip the next part. Colouring in Fractorium is generally much more easier and much more fun, so I decided to show this on a completely different set of variations.

Basics

We will use an extremely simple flame fractal but to save some time just copy the xml code from here: spiral to your (Ctrl+) and click on Paste Xml Append in the Edit menu in Fractorium. You should be looking at something like this now:

You may or may not like this low-contrast appearance. If you don't, then use the controls described above in the "Brightness" section. Finding the right settings may include increasing and decreasing the parameter values several times. For now, let's set Brightness to 1.6, Gamma to 1.9 and set the curve control to something like this:

to have something like this:

Note: Adjusting the curve controls may increase perceptual saturation. If you want to, you can compensate for that by lowering the value of the Saturation parameter in the at the top of the Palette page.

Colouring is performed at two different parts of the Fractorium UI. 1: Click on the Xforms tab and then on the Color tab; the parameters you find here belong to the currently selected xform. You can find the descriptions of these parameters here. To complement this, here is a nice tutorial on Color, Color Speed and Opacity written by tatasz (the tutorial was written for another software () but the principles are the same). If you start adjusting the colour index slider (marked with red in the picture below), only the colour of the actively selected xform will change since the Color Speed is set to 1 for both xforms.

To introduce more intricate colour patterns, both the Color Indices and the Color Speeds of all xforms of a scene have to be adjusted. There is no one right way to do this. In most cases playing with these values can consume a lot of time and they may produce dozens of different and good-looking colour patterns. The pre-set Gamma and Brightness values probably won't be suitable for all combinations so don't forget to adjust them when the image is too dark or too bright. Entering exact values for the Color Speed can become very important because even if you have set Fractorium to use small steps (as described in the Tip in the “Brightness” section), the increment will be 0.01 instead of the smallest possible increment which is 0.001. In some cases a lot can happen in that interval. For example, set the following values: Brightness = 0.7 Xform 1: Color Index = 0.639 Color Speed = 0.26 Xform 2: Color Index = 0.835 Color Speed = 0.002

Now you should see something like the upper picture. If you change the Colour Speed of Xform 2 to 0.006 the result will be the lower picture.

2: The other part of the UI that is dedicated to colouring is the Palette tab, and you'll find the descriptions for all of its elements here. So I'll just mention a few quick things worth remembering. Every single palette (colour gradient) you choose from the palette browser can lend a huge amount of different colouring to your scene. Although it is possible that a certain set of Color Indices and Color Speed values produce fine results with many different palettes, different settings for these parameters can produce very different results with the same palette, so it is expidient to play with them whenever you switch to a new palette. On the other hand, if you've found a set of parameter settings that work well and you feel lucky or just lazy, you can simply keep pushing the Random Palette button, which randomly selects a palette from the ones that are loaded in the palette browser.

The Frequency and Blur parameters give you additional options to get different colour schemes from the same palette. Different Frequency values will probably require different Color Index and Color Speed values. Blur will you smooth the colours when the colour differences are too harsh. However, its effect becomes stronger with higher Frequency values since colours will cover less pixels in the colour gradient while the blur remains set. Type "" in the serch field directly above the palette browser:

Then click on the gradient named Gold_and_Blue.

With Frequency set to 1 you'll have to set Blur to 5 or 6 (lower picture) to get some real difference.

If you set the Frequency to 9, a Blur value of 2 (lower picture), compared to 0, will already bring noticable changes:

The rest of the adjustment settings at the top of the Palette page let you alter the colours of a given colour gradient. This functionality is augmented by the curve controls at the bottom of the Palette page.

We have already used it for contrast enhancement, but if you select a base colour instead of the All option, the controls will let you alter or emphasize a colour range in your scene.

Lastly, I have to mention that the palette created as a result of using the adjustment settings will be saved with the scene as a base palette when you save it to the flame list on the Library page or as a separate file. However, the values used for the adjustment parameters will not be saved; this means that after you save a scene you will not be able to undo the palette modifications and the adjustment parameters will be set to their default values. The name of the original palette will also be lost, so if you want to remember it for any reason, you'll have to write it down somewhere.

Back to Business

So after a quick review of the colouring functionality, let's continue with colouring the scene we created in the first part of this tutorial. Make the last flame of that scene active by double clicking on it on the Library page. Click on the Add xform button than click on the Duplicate selected xforms button:

Select Xform 5 then set the the value of the sineblur variation to 1.2 on the Variations page, and set the Weight of Xform 5 to 0.045. Select Xform 6 and set its Weight to 0.1.

Our scene will take form quickly with the settings I provide here, but there is always a lot of time (maybe even a few hours) behind them—for example tossing around the affine controls in the preview area. It takes time to find good values or to find the range in which you get something other than chaotic randomness. So always be patient and relentless when creating your works.

Please set the following values: Xform 5 Xform 6 Pre affine transformation Leave them as they -0.5 -0.6 are 0.63 -0.5 -4.35 0.0 Post affine tranformation -1.85 -3.7 -0.312 0.126 3.7 -1.85 -0.126 -0.312 7.65 -16 1.98 -4.1

The result is a bit messy, so let's do some cleaning before we go on. On the Xforms page click on the Color tab and set the opacity of Xform 5 and 6 to 0.0. To further enhance the contribution of the current step we shall use the Xaos table of Fractorium (you can display it by clicking on the Xaos tab).

Xaos is usually a very important tool in the creation of a flame fractal. It could fill several tutorials by itself (and indeed it did). There is a very to-the-point description of Xaos on the website of Fractorium (the elements of the Xaos page are also explained here). But alone it will not give enough perspective to someone to start using it effectively. However there are some very good tutorials out there that will do exactly that (all are written for other software, but the principles are the same in Fractorium): This is definitely a good place te get educated (start with Xaos of course), but since this is a hard subject it may be expedient to read about the same thing in differently worded texts, for example: Apophysis Xaos Simplified Tut. by f--l--A----, and of course you can use for " tutorials."

Now that I have so masterfully and unnoticably avoided the need to explain xaos here—by linking stuff written by people who actually know what they are talking about—let's get back to our scene. Xaos basically lets you control how the xforms affect the contribution of one another to the scene, and Fractorium provides these controls in the form of a comfortable table layout. As the default setting, all the values in this table are 1. The values in the table below (found on the Xaos page) are not the final settings we will use, but if you start to change the ones to zeros as shown, you will be able to see in the preview area as the contributions of Xforms 5 and 6 gradually loose certain parts (become cleaner in this case).

Remember the Tip about changing the values to 0 or 1 by double-clicking.

You should be looking at something like this right now:

There, we added some colours, but it is as far from satisfactory as my commitment to my workout , so let's continue on. As you can see we have lost some details—the darker ones. This is normal since those details needed more iterations performed by the software to have a visible contribution to the scene (the "less solid" details are areas where a point is less likely to end up after the transformations of an iteration have been performed on them); now that we have added two more xforms, the source of those details (Xforms 1–4) have less chance to be chosen as the transformation for a given iteration which means that the already "less solid" parts receive even fewer points—to the extent where they become invisible. We are going to continue the colouring and fill up the empty by adding more xforms. (The patterns mentioned above can be brought back by increasing the weight of the first four xforms or by entering appropriate values in the xaos table, but this would cause the new xforms to have very little impact on the scene, and since the contributions of the first four xforms overlap each other, they cannot provide colour variance, and the scene would remain mostly monochrome.) There are several different variations or combinations of variations that can be used to substitute for the lost details; however, the appropriate set of affine parameters for each solution is different, and finding the right settings may take a long time. In addition the xaos values will probably have to be adjusted as well. This tutorial will walk you through a possible course, and I'll show an example for an alternative at the end.

First let's make this a bit more solid looking; select Xforms 2, 3 and 4 and change their Weight to 1.2. Click Select None. Now select Xforms 5 and 6 and click on the Duplicate selected xforms button. We could've just added two new xforms, but finding some useful sets of parameters might be easier if the affine settings, variations and colour settings of Xforms 5 and 6 are used as the starting point. The following method does not use variations for creating filling patterns only the affine transformations and blurring. There are cases where the overall design and the parameters can be calculated, but this is probably not one of them (at least I don't know how) and I feel the "trial and error" can be quicker here anyway.

Xaos can also bring forth new patterns, and there is no xaos setting that would clearly show you all the possible patterns. Therefore, the game is something like this: You'll have to work with the affine controls and adjust the xaos values (or use the Random Xaos button above the xaos table) alternatingly—and you can also play with the previously added Xforms 5 and 6. Don't forget these two things: 1) The Random Xaos button sets the values between 0 and 3, but you may have to use a wider range; 2) Use what I wrote in the Tip directly before the "Intermezzo" because you may need to move the affine controls further than what the default limits allow and you'll need to observe the details while doing so.

So let's say that you have found the following settings:

Affine parameters: Xform 7 Xform 8 Pre affine transformation Leave them as they -0.88 -4 are 4 -0.88 -9 7.5 Post affine tranformation -18 12 -4.1 -4.42 12 18 4.42 -4.1 10 -25 -1.67 0.17

Xaos values:

So here is where we stand right now:

The coloured parts are a bit out of place, but there is no need to arrange everything meticulously right now because depending on the chosen palette and settings on the Color page, they may need to be changed anyway or they may become much less prominent.

So let's do the real colouring. It is about using the Palette page and the Color page (on the Xforms page) alternatingly like I described it in the "Basics" section. I would only add the following as specific advice to our current case: - This scene is harder to colour than the usual, it will stay monochrome most of the time; therefore, choose a palette with more colours and rapid transitions (or increase the frequency) this will make it easier to detect the right settings where colour variance can be achieved. - Slowly start to move the Color Index slider and from time to time shift through the entire range of Color Speed (-1 to +1). - Start doing this procedure for every xforms; whenever you see that even the slightest colour variance appears (other then the coloured lines in the picture above), append the scene to the list on the Library page. Then continue the process with another xform and append the scene every time you achieve a different or a greater level of colour variance.

Here are some example settings: Palette page: Type Baby in the search field above the palette list and click on the palette that appears. Then set the Frequency to 8, set the Contrast and Saturation to 4 and the Brightness to 3. Color parameters: Xform 1 - Color Index: 0.459 / Color Speed: 0.03 / Opacity: 1 Xform 2 - Color Index: 0.486 / Color Speed: 0.025 / Opacity: 1 Xform 3 - Color Index: 0.502 / Color Speed: 0.025 / Opacity: 1 Xform 4 - Color Index: 0.482 / Color Speed: 0.025 / Opacity: 1 Xform 5 - Color Index: 0.0 / Color Speed: -1 / Opacity: 0 Xform 6 - Color Index: 0.0 / Color Speed: -1 / Opacity: 0 Xform 7 - Color Index: 0.0 / Color Speed: -1 / Opacity: 0 Xform 8 - Color Index: 0.055 / Color Speed: -1 / Opacity: 0 Final Xform - Color Index: 1.0 / Color Speed: 0.870 / Opacity: 1 Color box: During the workflow I usually change the values of the Color box on the Flame page many times. These are the final settings I used for this scene:

Final Touches

Here I will just mention subjective adjustments that, in my opinion, improve our scene. Composition:

Change the values in the Geometry box on the Flame page to the ones shown here.

Adding a bit of blur to the filling pattern: Select Xform 8. Type post_blur_linear in the search field, set the value of the variation to 1 and set its parameters: post_blur_linear_length to 1.75 and post_blur_linear_angle to 2.1.

Colour adjustment:

If you change the values in the xaos table to the ones shown here, the darker areas in the yellow mass will receive a tiny amount of green tint

(instead of being just dark yellow).

If everything we did went OK, you should be looking at something like this:

General Tips for Modification and Final Render

Modifications First, as I promised I'll show you an alternative filling pattern.

The picture on the left is from our original scene; the picture on the right is the result of using the variation post_log on Xform 7 (which of course necessitates different affine settings) and using a different palette (gipper) and different Color parameters.

Here are a few suggestions for ways to modify the scene: - Move, rotate and skew the xforms. For good results I suggest transforming them in groups (select the xforms you want to work with on the Select page on the Xforms page). For example, (1, 2, 3, 4), (5 and 6), (7 and 8) or (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8); you can also try transforming Xform 1 by itself but it will require more patience. - You can try out diferent palettes, Color parameters and Curve settings. - You can change the composition by: 1) , moving, rotating the preview area, 2) modify the values of the variations in the Final Xform or add or delete variations in it, 3) play with the Pre Affine control of the Final Xform, 4) change the settings in the Geometry box on the Flame page. - You can add variations to any xforms or change the parameters of the existing ones—this can be extremely time consuming. I suggest that if you make such a change to any of the first four xforms, then apply it to all of them. - You can play with the xaos values to make certain parts and patterns more or less prominent or to explore new ones.

Note: When you save a scene to the list on the Library page, or perform an Undo operartion, the software will the selection made on the Select page. So be sure to reselect what you want after every such action. Some examples for applying these modifications:

Jagged Edges

Sometimes you may find that some edges have become jagged during your working on the scene. The reason is that certain settings that may give extra sharpness cannot be used well in every situation. If you came across some jaggedness you can do the following (not necessarily all of them, just as many as you need): - Increase the Supersample value (between 1 and 4) that you can find in the Iteration box on the Flame page. This will only effect the image in the preview area, so if you use this don't forget to increase the Supersample value in the Final Render as well to get the same results with the output image. - Increase the value of the Spatial Filter Width and/or set the Spatial Filter Type to Gaussian (if you were using something else) in the Filter box on the Flame page. - In the Final Render window, set an image resolution that is higher than what you wish to have and scale down the image in an image prcessing software. - Increase the the value of the DE Filter Min Radius and the DE Filter Radius. Note that the Min value cannot be higher than the set Max value.

Final Render

When you are satisfied with your work (I once saw a man who had heard of this feeling) press the Final Render button to adjust the settings for the output image:

This will display the Final Render Dialog; everything you need to know is expalined on this page. It is extensive but also very straight forward, so I don’t think explaining the process here is necessary.

Ok, so this is it, I think we're done—at least I certainly am. Thank you for reading this unexpectedly long tutorial, and a huge loud Thank You to the people who wrote the materials I linked here. Special thanks to Matt, the developer of Fractorium, for taking the time to read it and to suggest improvements. If you want to upload this tutorial elsewhere, send me a note: http://b33rheart.deviantart.co… And I would be very glad to see any work that is based on this tutorial.