Apophysis 3D Revealed

Dear Visitors, there’s been a lot of activity recently relevant to Apophysis 2.08 3D hack, but the work is development of new plugins and scripts, so I haven’t taken much time to update or add to this site. That will change as there are many new things to add in both pictures and additional notes about using the program.

An exciting new development in the works is a script to allow you to render a stereo pair image set from a single parameter setting! If you have trouble understanding what’s taking place inside Apo, it can be a challenge to figure out how to find the right parameters for a paired image. The script was started by a good friend, Fred E. from the Apophysis discussion list and I’ve been fleshing it out with detailed features to make stereoscopic rendering much easier.

Other developments not mentioned on this blog up to now is the addition of a number of interesting new 3D plugins for Apo. Please visit my site on devArt for those plugins and information about them. http://aporev.deviantart.com

If this program is new to you here’s some basic information about the difference between plugins and scripts.

Both of those features allow you to expand what the basic program can do. Scripts can be simple where they tend to automate a task.

Scripts:

All the commands in the script get run together in sequence when you start the script. The program has a script editor so you can examine the code and make adjustments and changes to it, or start from scratch and write a new script. This is handy in many scripts as this is how you might make small adjustments to some of the parameters that it uses.

More complicated scripts make use of the full range of programming language to do many additional things. Fred E. commented to me recently that if you want, you could create a script to balance your checkbook. That has nothing to do with fractals, but the script facility is very flexible and powerful.

The bottom line for scripts is that they make use of the basic program functions and the installed plugins (Variations) to accomplish tasks ranging from simple to very complicated.

Plugins

Plugins are very powerful too, but they accomplish something different than scripts. Apophysis uses Variations to provide the means of warping and transforming points in the rendering field to generate the fantastic range of fractal flames that exist.

Plugins do not have the access to many of the basic Apo functions that scripts have, but scripts cannot modify the rendering points like plugins. Ideally they both work together – the plugin creates interesting modifications to “point handling” processes and the script makes use of whatever the plugins make available.

As I’ve learned to program plugins, I’ve developed this philosophical outlook on the process of plugin operation:

Plugins are similar to spray painting where you have no idea which individual droplet of paint will appear out of the nozzle, but when it does, the plugin can literally do anything to that droplet before it lands on the image space. Well, not quite anything! but close enough. Most particularly it can move them around freely.

I’ve discovered that many plugins cause the image to dramatically darken and the reason is because the math behind the processes ends up assigning new point positions that are wildly outside of the rendering area, thus making the image have very few collected points per pixel. The solution then is to be careful with the math processes to make sure that the points stay inside the visible area and get used to brighten the intended patterns.

There are useful purposes in making points disappear though! More on that later…

Happy Holidays and Happy Fractaling!