Learning Ultra Fractal

by Chris Martin (Velvet--Glove)

Introduction People frequently ask me about how they can learn to use the Ultra Fractal program or express an interest in learning. I thought I would put together this article to help people get started with this extraordinary and absorbing program.

Ultra Fractal is a software program that is used to create fractal images like the ones you can see in my Deviant Art gallery. Now at version 5, UF comes in three flavours – a very basic Express Edition, the Creative Edition (my recommendation if you are not proposing to make animated fractals) and the rather more expensive Extended Edition which allows you to create animations of your fractal creations and use a network of computers for rendering tasks. All editions are now available for both Windows and Mac computers. A trial version of the software can be downloaded for free from the author's website at ultrafractal.com. The trial is fully functional but until you purchase a licence for the program your rendered images will have a watermark added to them.

At first glance the program does appear to be rather complex to use and somewhat intimidating, there are so many tabs, functions and confusing concepts to understand. Try not to let this put you off, it takes a little time and study to understand what all the dialogs and controls are for and how to use them properly so you will need to find a few tutorials and other help resources to get you started on making some beautiful images. After that the rest is up to you – be prepared to put in a lot of practice if you really want to produce first class images, UF is just a tool and great results don’t happen straight out of the box, you have to work at it. However, once you gain a certain familiarity with the program and begin to develop your own pattern and style of working the rewards and possibilities of Ultra Fractal are unlimited.

Beginning to learn UF Here is a short list of some of the tutorials, resources and tips that I think beginners will find especially helpful when starting out:

 First of all you really should work through the tutorials provided in the program's Help section to get an idea of the basics. The Help file in general is also an excellent source of information about how the program works and the program interface so do take some time to browse and study the information there. If you prefer to have a printed reference to work from, or want Spanish or German translations, then you can download the manual as a .pdf Acrobat file from ultrafractal.com

 Have a look through the UF tutorials here on DeviantArt. I have collected links to some of the best material here: UF Tutorials and a more extensive list of what's available on DA can be found in this group gallery: Ultra-Fractal-Redux: Tutorials and Resources.

 If video instruction is more your style then check out two users on You Tube who each have published 3 or 4 free video tutorials on various aspects of UF: Louise Wagstaff and The Danger Pig.

 For more professional and structured video instructional material there is also Z00reka’s extensive UF video course available here, for a modest price: Learning Ultra Fractal 5 (Creative Edition)

 One final resource to check out is the official Ultra Fractal Forum on the UF author’s website. Here you can ask questions about using UF and get help with any problems. The author of the program, Frederik Slijkerman, often answers questions personally. Occasionally other users share their image parameters here. Finally you can report any bugs or suggest features you would like to see in the program in future.  Don’t forget that a good way to gain experience and learn new things is to examine and play with image parameters created by others; load the parameters into UF (more detail on this procedure is explained lower down if you are unsure how this works) and examine how the image was made. Make some changes yourself and see what happens. Where tweaking is allowed use shared parameters as a starting point for your own image but make the changes substantial, so the image is rather different and truly something to call your own. When publishing the results do please remember, as a courtesy, to credit the original artist in your comments. Free parameters are available all over Deviant Art if you search for them. Here is one group gallery where you can find a wide range of good parameters: Ultra-Fractal-Redux: Fractals with parameters and in my own gallery I have shared a great many good quality image parameters here: Parameters and Resources

 My own tutorials are not for complete beginners but some of you may find them approachable and useful if you work through them with care. I include them here for the sake of completeness: Tutorials and Guides

A cautionary note about other Internet resources If you do a search online you will find dozens of Internet sites out there with information about Ultra Fractal, everything from highly technical mathematical information to more general articles, private formulas and help files, and the promise of exciting tutorials to explore. Find one site and you will invariably find links to a dozen more. However, when I was a new user in 2006, I found that much of this tutorial material was rather out of date and therefore unhelpful. I was frustrated by references to program controls and functions (especially refs. to UF v.2) that either no longer existed or had been renamed in the newer, updated version of the program that I had downloaded (which was v.4). Knowing nothing about UF at that time these experiences only served to confuse me further. I mention this only so that you will be prepared for what you might find out there. Bearing this caveat in mind, here are a few more links and resources that you may wish to investigate further:

 Ultra Fractal Resources is a list of some generally useful links to resources all over the Net. The tutorials are very dated now but there are still some nuggets of useful information to be gleaned from reading through some of these pages.  www.fractalus.com/info has some very interesting and informative articles and tips by Damien Jones about fractals and fractal art in general. Worth reading for some background information. My top tips Here are a few tips for you, in no particular order:

 Make sure your program is always kept updated with the latest formulas and colourings in the public database. You can freely update your files any time from within the program via the Options menu – providing you are connected to the Internet at the time, UF will automatically download and install all files for you. Formulas can also be downloaded manually from this site: formulas.ultrafractal.com if preferred.

 Some formulas are not available in the public database but still freely available from the authors concerned. The most commonly used private formulas can be found and downloaded from these sites: o Ultra Fractal Resources o www.nahee.com/Software/+Formulas+Parameters/ o http://www.hiddendimension.com/futils.html These private files should be unzipped and placed in a new folder within UF’s Formulas folder structure e.g. Ultra Fractal 5\Formulas\Private. Just make sure you keep them separate from the public database files which are stored in the \Public folder.

 When starting out it is very tempting to take a pot-luck approach and randomly pick a formula and/or colouring to play with from the hundreds of files available in the Public formulas folder. My experience is that you actually learn very little from this approach as it is simply too random and the chances are that you will pick something far too specialised or exotic and get very disheartened at the apparent lack of progress. Unless you know something about how to use these (some are designed to work in combination with other specific files, for example) you will often find random choices yield nothing useful. My advice to complete beginners, therefore, would be to start by using a basic Mandelbrot or Julia formula (on the Formula tab) together with one of a basic “toolset” of colouring algorithms (on the Outside tab) and just play with these to start with – by restricting your choices and becoming very familiar with just a small number of colouring algorithms you will learn a great deal about what various parameters do and the effects of particular settings, knowledge that will serve you very well when you eventually begin to try other colourings or applying familiar colourings to new formulas. Here is a short list of colourings that I have found to be relatively easy to use and very flexible, giving interesting results almost straight away: o Orbit Traps (UF3) in dmj3.ucl

o Doodads and Thingamajigs in ldm.ucl

o DoodadsII, ThingamajigsII, Plane Curve Traps II and Thin Orbit TrapsII in tma.ucl

o Gaussian Integer and Triangle Inequality Average in Standard.ucl

 If you find yourself in a position where you have loaded a random new formula and see nothing but a totally black or blue image here are a few things to try before giving up and trying something else:

o Add a colouring to the Outside tab – some formulas do nothing unless there is a colouring algorithm applied. If this doesn’t seem to work at first then try changing a couple of parameters on the Outside tab and/or the Formula tab (NB. not all formulas have these options).

o Add a colouring to the Inside tab. Again, some formulas do nothing without loading a colouring.

o Try the Reset Image Location button on the Location tab - you may be zoomed in too far to see the ‘big picture’. o For murky or indistinct images try rotating the gradient, moving a gradient colour point or changing the Transfer function on the Outside tab – there may be something there but barely visible because of the distance between gradient points or how the gradient is being applied.

 Add your favourite formula and colouring files as Presets to the Browse button for quick access. Look up “Presets” in the Help file for how to do this. You can do the same for saved fractal layers and for transformations on the Mapping Tab too.

 The Help files provided by some authors can give additional useful information on formulas and colourings and their parameter settings. For some of the colourings you can access these tips from within UF by having the Fractal Mode window open – hovering over parameter settings will display these tips in the Fractal Mode window. Some authors have help files available on their websites and/or as text files to download. These are worth checking out when you are ready for more in-depth information on the various parameters that the authors have programmed into their files.

o Some help files may already be installed in your /Public database folder

o More of these Help files and websites can be found via the Ultra Fractal Resources webpage.

o Ron Barnett has tutorials on some of his colourings (in reb.ucl) here: www.hiddendimension.com

 The Gradient Editor in UF plays a fundamental role in creating your own unique images so make a point of finding out how to use it early on to create your own colour palettes. The program Help File has a whole chapter dedicated to Gradients – I recommend you take the time to work through the material and learn about how to create, delete and edit colour Control Points, using Transparency in the gradient and generating random gradients. The latter are very useful as a starting point for editing in order to develop your own gradients.

o A few additional hints on gradient editing can be found here.

o Newton’s Wheel is a useful site where you can generate a variety of useful gradients for UF.

 When you have learned a little more about some of the basics of the program the next major area to tackle is the use of masking. This can be a difficult concept to master for some but it really is such a vital part of good image making that it is well worth taking some time to study the possibilities that this technique opens up.

 At some point in your fractal journey of discovery you will want to start adding textures to your images. When this happens I recommend starting a texture library that you can dip into in the future; make a point of saving any interesting texture layers as separate fractal image files, with meaningful names so that you can find them again, either to use as is or as a basis for developing new textures.

 Here are a few texture making file combinations for you to experiment with, Outside Tab colourings that I have found to be particularly useful and versatile in my own work. Experiment with all the different parameter settings to be found within the .ucl files themselves and try playing with different Colour Density and Transfer Functions at the top of the Outside Tab for the most interesting results, saving good layers as you go along. If there is no obvious way to change the scale of a texture in the parameters try zooming in or out in the fractal image window to alter texture size.

o Load up the plain Pixel formula in lkm.ufm on the Formula tab and try some of the following colourings on the Outside Tab with it: S.F.B.M II, Voroni Colouring, Truchet FBM and 3D SFBM in sam.ucl Hodge, Plasma, Plasma Convolution and Weave in mt.ucl MMF3a-AlternateFBM in mmf3.ucl 3D Texturizer Enhanced III in reb.ucl

o Using a plain Julia, Mandelbrot or other formula of your choice, try playing with the following colourings on the Outside tab to get some cool texture and colour effects that will follow the lines, shapes and iterations of your fractal. Experiment with gradient colours and merge modes as well as transparency and/or attached masks to blend these effects with other layers: Triangle Inequality Average, Smooth (Mandelbrot) in standard.ucl

Triangles in ldm.ucl

fBm Popcorn Trap in mt.ucl

Tip: The use of a mask, attached to a texture layer, is a technique you can use to confine the texture to certain parts of your image only, such as the background or particular areas of the main fractal structure.

It is also worth noting that some colourings have built-in texture functions that you can use – the Doodads and Thingamajig family of colourings mentioned above, for instance, have some cool texture parameters to play with so do check these out too whenever you come across them. Some colourings also include some basic masking functions that you may find useful in certain circumstances too.

 I have collected links to some sample texture parameter packs I found on DeviantArt for you to dissect and play with here: UF Resources

 When using the Switch Mode (F7) to obtain a Julia set from a Mandelbrot set you will get a more uncluttered result if you pick a switch point that is a little way out from the white “coastline” of the Mandelbrot figure i.e. out into the black area surrounding the classic Mandy shape. The resulting Julia will have fewer of those itsy bitsy little iterations and specks sprinkled all over the image, enabling you to achieve a much cleaner look to your spirals. You can also sometimes remove debris by lowering the Bailout parameter on the Formula tab, though this can have unwanted side effects on occasion.

 Be careful of extremely fine texture details in your image. You may choose what looks like a lovely speckled, sandy effect or a cool crosshatched texture of fine lines on screen only to find that UF’s anti- aliasing (AA) feature will render that portion of the image as smooth and pretty featureless, not what you wanted at all! Sometimes you have to make textures much “coarser” looking on screen or you may need to turn off the AA rendering setting (sometimes at the expense of other image characteristics) to get the visual effect you want. Having said that, the opposite can also sometimes be true and you may be pleasantly surprised (or irritated!) by unexpected details that appear in a rendered image that simply weren’t visible when you were working in UF’s image window. UF is full of surprises like this. For this reason I usually render a small-ish image (about 800px x 600px, typically) to check on the likely outcome before embarking on any large rendering job that may take hours to complete – this gives me the opportunity to correct any anomalies or to try again with different AA settings if needs be. It’s not 100% foolproof but it tends to work most of the time.

This article by Damien Jones has further information and tips about anti-aliasing and fractal images that you may find helpful: fractalus.com/info/antialias.htm

 When rendering your final image use a lossless image format such as .bmp or .tiff as this will give you the best quality image with excellent detail in your fractals. You can then perform any re-sizing, sharpening or other post-processing tasks in an outside graphics program, if necessary, then save the file as an optimised .jpg for display online. The reason for this being the fact that .jpg is a “lossy” image format – interesting fractal detail may be lost or unwanted visual artefacts may be introduced when rendering as a .jpg, and even more detail lost if you then go on to save as a .jpg a second time after post-processing work... each Save of a .jpg involves an degree of image compression which will make the image progressively worse so it’s a good idea to save as a .jpg once only... as the final step.  Viewing parameter files posted by other users and sharing yours is very easy. As mentioned above the “code” for each image is composed of plain text. This information is basically the name of the image followed by the parameter information contained within a pair of curly braces: { } To send your parameter file in an email message simply click on the image window in UF and press Ctrl-C to copy this text to the clipboard. Paste this material into an email using Ctrl-V. That’s all there is to it! To view someone else’s image you need to highlight their parameter text, copy it, then paste it into an open image window in UF using Ctrl-V. The text below is an example of a simple parameter file to try this with... just make sure you start your highlight selection at the beginning of the title at the top (“Fractal1”) and select everything to the end, including that all important, final curly brace: }

Fractal1 {

fractal:

title="Fractal1" width=640 height=480 layers=1 resolution=200

credits="Christine-Ann Martin;1/17/2008"

layer:

method=multipass caption="Background" opacity=100

mapping:

center=-0.8314193698045/0.229091196978 magn=1186.8375

formula:

maxiter=500 percheck=off filename="Standard.ufm" entry="Mandelbrot"

p_start=0/0 p_power=2/0 p_bailout=1e18

inside:

transfer=none solid=4278215290

transfer=linear solid=4286722382 filename="Standard.ucl"

entry="Basic" p_type=Iteration

gradient:

linked=yes smooth=yes rotation=85 index=85 color=0 index=196

color=16777215

opacity:

smooth=yes rotation=85 index=85 opacity=255 index=196 opacity=255

} This parameter file is small and simple with some readable contents. Larger, more complex files may be compressed by UF and look like large blocks of scrambled letters and numbers. Both types are valid parameter files that can be exchanged between users by copying & pasting as described above.

Troubleshooting tip: sometimes UF refuses to accept pasted parameters, particularly where these have been copied from emails generated by certain programs. In cases like this try pasting into a plain text editor like Notepad first then copying from there to UF. This will often remove the hidden formatting and line breaks that UF cannot interpret.

 As you work to develop a fractal image, regularly save different versions of the image as you go along. You may not need them but sometimes image changes are introduced that can go horribly wrong and the program’s Undo/History settings are limited so it’s often very useful to have an earlier saved version to go back to. Sometimes your early material can also provide a fruitful hunting ground for creating another, altogether different image at a later date so don’t be afraid to save numerous old files somewhere! When saved as parameter (.upr) files the image information is stored as a few dozen lines of plain text “code” that really don’t take up much storage space at all. 

 My final tip is to stress the importance of backing up your UF image parameter data. Programs, formulas, colourings and help files can usually be replaced but your image parameters are totally unique and can never be recovered in the event of loss. Backups are boring and tedious, granted, but please don’t think it can’t happen to you – a sudden, catastrophic failure of your hard drive, a computer virus, user error, or simply Windows having a Bad Hair Day can wipe out hours, days, even years of work at a single stroke! I’ve seen disasters like these befall a number of other users and friends so I strongly recommend that you to get into the good habit of regularly copying all your precious parameter files using whatever method and storage media you find the most convenient to avoid this kind of heartache altogether.

 More UF tips and tricks can be found in this excellent DA news article: Project Educate - Tricks of the UF Trade

Taking the next step

If, after all this private study and work you have caught the UF bug, are thirsty to find out more and really want to get a more formal grip on using the program then I can highly recommend Janet Parke's series of e-books, the content of which comes from the online instruction classes that Janet taught for several years at the Visual Arts Academy (which has since closed). Yes, this does require the investment of a little money, as well as a fair amount of your own personal time, energy and commitment but it is the surest way to learning how to use UF that I know and a few dollars very well spent, in my opinion. If you take a look around the galleries of UF users here on DA you will notice how many artists have completed one or more of these classes and most will testify that they learned more in a few short weeks of class study than they could ever have learned in months, or even years, of working on their own. Janet's first course takes beginners through the very basics of using Ultra Fractal and on to a methodical and very productive way of creating fractal images, rather than the seemingly 'hit and miss' experience that many new users feel when attempting to make images themselves. It's perfect for people who are just starting out with the program. The second course builds on this knowledge and teaches you solid principles of masking, a very important aspect of image making and something that is often misunderstood or difficult to get to grips with for many users. The final course goes on to teach fractal artistry, examining fine art concepts such as composition, colour, atmosphere, eye flow etc. If this seems like a blatant plug for these teaching courses then rest assured I have not been bribed or coerced into saying any of this and receive no reward for doing so! I am just a very satisfied student who honestly believes that this is by far and away the best and most efficient way of learning how to use UF to its fullest potential with the minimum of frustration and pain.  To get a flavour of the content and style of the ebook courses you can read the very first chapter online here, for free: Sample chapter.

Ultra Fractal 5

Update: A new version of Ultra Fractal was released in June 2008, after this guide was originally written. Whilst it is still perfectly valid and possible to use all the older style formulas, colourings and techniques described in some of the tutorials mentioned in this guide it should be noted that v.5 introduced a radically different way of creating fractal images, through the use of object and class components (also commonly referred to as plugins). Working through the material suggested in this Guide will still be useful and relevant to new users of UF5, and highly recommended for the understanding of many fractal making fundamentals, but do be aware that this is only half the story of what is now possible. When you feel ready to tackle a fundamentally new way of creating fractals within UF5 then read this Introduction to Objects article, by Damien Jones, and then have a look at the UF5 Challenge Tutorials written by Ron Barnett and others. These challenge tutorials cover the basics of UF5’s new features and are extremely useful and informative. Do note, however, that the material is quite advanced, with a steep learning curve. Just take your time working through them, they really will help with your learning!

Final words I hope this brief summary of 'How to learn UF' has been helpful. This is by no means an exhaustive list of learning resources, merely a few pointers and personal tips to help you get started. I hope this will encourage you to at least 'have a go' and explore for yourself the extraordinary world of fractal art that Ultra Fractal can open the door to.

Happy hunting and good luck to you! 

Chris x x

“Velvet--Glove” on Deviant Art

January 2008 Document History

v.1 - January 18th 2008 Uploaded to DeviantArt - Link to file

February 2008: Spanish translation made available - Link to file

v.1.1 - November 21st 2008 Document revised: some broken links removed, new links and notes on UF5 added.

v.1.2 - January 12th 2010 Document revised: update & link to new JP course e-books, other links to UF Wiki and DA material added.

v.1.3 - December 8th 2011 Document revised: broken web links corrected/removed.

December 8th 2011: Italian translation made available – Link to file

v.1.4 - November 22nd 2013 Document update: New links to online video tutorials and to JP’s sample ebook chapter. Links checked. Other small updates

v.1.5 - December 22nd 2014

Document revised: broken links removed/corrected. New link to resources on DA added.

v.1.6 - April 28th 2016

Document revised: several broken links removed. New link to UF Forum added.