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.