Apophysis 3D Revealed

Randomness

One of the really really really great things about Apophysis is that it has a wonderful set of “random” exploration tools. Some artists feel that “merely random” flames are lacking in artistic quality, but when you consider the realm that is being discovered it’s an essential but still very small tool.

The full range of expression in Apophysis is literally infinite. No matter how far you push in some direction, there are a few thousand more possible variations that can be tweaked on top of whatever you’ve got. That’s both good news and bad news. Along the way the probability is that most of the possible sets of parameters result in something that is generally uninteresting or even displeasing.

Any artist can randomly apply paint to a surface (wall or canvas) or object (chair, table, dresser, bookcase), but that is not always going to result in a desirable finished piece. However, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as we’re reminded in relation to certain collections of weird and/or ugly paintings in a gallery priced far beyond what we spent buying our personal vehicle.

Certainly the phrase applies to the abstract art that comes from Apophysis! Each of the many individuals who work with the program have a different mind set from which their personal aesthete develops. Each person develops growth of their personal skill-set as they learn what is possible, trends that they like, and techniques that help shape and direct progress in each new session of creative discovery. The real beauty is that you can never exhaust the potential for newness and surprising developments.

Some might criticize newcomers for their enjoyment of basically random flames but there’s nothing at all wrong with randomness in flame fractals. Despite the method of their creation the results have been selectively chosen for some special quality out of hundreds of options. Remember that the newly installed program defaults to batches of 100! Even an experienced user of the program finds that delving into randomness on occasion prevents the ice of hard determinism from locking up the wheels of inspiration. At any level of expertise on the part of the user, random tools provide for new ideas, new jumping off points, and new appreciation for the immensity of the Fractal universe we’re exploring.

As artists develop greater skill and increase their understanding of tools and techniques they may find that some of what they really enjoyed when they started starts to appear stale and too common for their taste. That’s completely OK because even when you skip entire clouds of similar flames of one type or another, you can’t run out of room for finding and nurturing some new characteristic or pattern trend. Often, as has been observed by others, the entire community of program users swing and sway along popularity paths, which are a dynamic of the way we learn and grow. It actually operates much like the way a gigantic flock of birds shift and transform their flight patterns in the fall sky – each taking a cue from their neighbor with an entire sky in which to flow collectively and expressively while going generally in the same direction.

Again we find that Apophysis has very special tools for this unique environment. It takes time and patience to go through building a flame one transform at a time, with 60+ variations possible for each one and each new parameter interacts with all that have up to that point been chosen. It becomes faster to use the “random” Morph tool in a deliberate fashion.

Choose a particular variation from the list that you wish to try as a “next step” and set a “speed” for the amount of change per sample, and in each new click you get 8 new visualizations of parameter tweaking with your current design-set as the center. In a minute or two you can cover dozens of possibilities that using one parameter at a time would have taken hours! The idea here is that you gain a good sense of what each type of variation can accomplish so your choice of direction is entirely deliberate and you use the “randomness factor” to literally travel faster along the creativity path.

Or clear the entire list and then select a few special variations that you know or like and then call for another list of random flames. This new list will only use the selected variations.

Stereoscopic Enhancement

What Stereoscopy brings to the table further expands the notion of “what is interesting.” Even the most common and mundane ‘random flames’ can present something of detailed new interest. Often some small twisty detail overlooked in a quick glance of the big picture can be zoomed in on and it will reveal wild action, a nuance of detail or some feature that was totally unexpected.

There is a physically satisfying aspect to stereoscopic viewing. Using the naturally occurring facility of binocular vision, stereoscopic disparity in two almost identical renders transforms into an explorable visual volume of space. Because of the spatial factor, tiny details become noticed for where they are as they become a definite place at which your eye rests before traveling onwards. Shapes reveal themselves differently than you had supposed based strictly on seeing the render as a flat image. New understanding dawns as to what Apophysis is doing and what direction you might want to go to enhance a particular feature.

In the Apo-designing process it is very often true that surfaces are transparent and the effect you are looking at is a combination of different surfaces and their current alignment to each other in the preview window. That’s why when you start to rotate things, the whole thing seems to become something else very different from what you expected or wanted. In stereo, you see those relationships. The blended textures resolve into one feature in front of another and you know what direction you have to go to be able to focus on a desired element fully.

Take marbles for example. They are easy to make, but which orientation will be the most interesting? That depends on your starting flame and a lot of other factors, but by examining a quick pair of screen captures, you can tell how they all relate to each other on the marble surface and camera direction or flame orientation.

Some visually symmetrical patterns are very enjoyable but why do they distort into something unsymmetrical so easily? Look at them in stereo to get the answer. It allows you to eliminate hundreds of trial view directions that will be unsatisfactory to you and zero into precisely the ones that yield something of most interest.

By default and evolution of the program, much of what it does with flames takes place on a flat surface which doesn’t offer much of interest to a stereo view, or even a rotated 3D view seen in a single 2D image. But those flat surfaces can be transformed into interesting shapes by using some of the 3D plugin variations. In stereo you can quickly determine what changes are interesting enough to keep and which won’t contribute positively to your direction of creative flow – regardless of your intended render format, single image (2D) or a stereoscopic 3D pair.

By this point you’re probably asking, “so how do I get these ‘easy’ stereoscopic views?” The short answer is Screen Captures. Low resolution previews are available in less than 30 seconds and the better ones take maybe 1 to 10 minutes depending on the size of the window and details of the current flame. The more complete answer involves both an explanation of what makes a stereoscopic image pair “work” and how to accomplish that goal given some of the peculiarities of the Apophysis 3D hack.

This website will be presenting tutorials on those subjects as there is time to put them together. The blog will provide a place for articles like this and a hopefully useful interaction for stereoscopically interested members of the Apo 3D rendering community. The overall goal is a greatly enhanced experience with Apophysis… How’s that for those of you who are already “apoholics” by discovery and declaration?!!!

To expand the metaphor a bit…

Stereoscopic flames make previous Flame Fractal Eye Candy seem like candy without the sweetness, like plastic models of candy used in store displays. Stereoscopic visualizations turns the “artificial” into the “real thing.” Don’t get me wrong here, this is metaphor, and I thoroughly enjoy almost all the Flame Fractals I’ve seen!

Yes, I’m into stereoscopic imagery! Passionately! And I love fractals of all types but none are as satisfying to my aesthete as Fractal Flames. In that universe, Apophysis is my tool of choice because of the way its licensed and the community that has grown up around it.

A big Thank You to each developer and contributor!