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!

Note: Make sure to visit the pictures on the Stereo Exhibition page! They are presented in a wonderful Page Flip plugin.

The Apophysis program has always provided a fascinating range of fractals that while infinite, are also unique compared to the original Mandelbrot fractals and the related Julia sets. Until a few years ago, Apophysis only created fractals as 2D images. The shapes and patterns it creates are called flames because of the resemblance of many of them to various flame like shapes. The name for the program means to protrude a shape so it seems to me that it got that name for good reason, the patterns suggest shapes!

Classic Flame Fractal Shapes

To begin with that suggestion of shape was as far as it went. People love looking at the images that were rendered and imagining what shapes were present. It’s similar to cloud watching and imagining animals and figures in the cloud patterns. The intrigue of suggested shape is part of the attractiveness of this class of fractals.

When I first came across the program I attempted to ‘trick’ the program in various ways to show me more than one viewpoint of a flame fractal so that I could see the results in 3D. It didn’t work. Nothing repeated with sufficient predictability or defined direction for it to reveal the real shapes.

A review of the source code told me that it was entirely possible to modify it to include the third dimension, but not having the time, I wasn’t the one to set about the task.

Then a young genius with the handle “Zueuk” came along and did the conversion into 3D. Now you can visualize, design and render scenes of flames from any angle and best of all, it faithfully allows you to craft the precise view locations for stereoscopic output. Not only can you get an idea of what features are located where, but you can explicitly see the shapes in glorious detail and in 3D space!

Please understand, the program does not include direct stereoscopic tools. To obtain stereo views you have to get your render-camera to the right viewpoints AND you have to design a flame that is more than just a flat surface picture! In some cases that can be challenging.

Most of the “variations” and “plugins” for the program are written solely for 2D manipulation. That means that while they make interesting shape-suggestive patterns, they do so by painting flat – like onto a canvas. There are a useful number of additional plugins which have been written for the 3D hack versions and they provide the means to pop a flat texture into a genuine 3D shape.

Once the shape is established, some of the 2D variations end up painting on the 3D shapes and that allows you to continue designing in 3D. Whether you explore using random tools, or deliberately build a flame transform by transform, and painstakingly work your way through the long list of variation options, the 3D flame that results can be very interesting and often surprising.

Discussions on this blog will help the beginner to use Apo 3D hack with basic guidelines. Since the program is quite complex, there’s plenty for an experienced flame designer to learn too. That’s especially true if you want to develop quality stereoscopic image pairs as the output.

As things develop on this site, a number of stereoscopic tools will be developed as scripts, which makes it easy for you to use, whether or not you understand what needs to happen. I’ve started with one really useful and basic script called the Rotate Pitch Script. It easily tips the Pitch axis up and down so you can switch from a top-down view (Pitch=0) to a direct side view (Pitch=90), or a view from 30 degrees. Anyone using Apo 3D needs to do this a lot during the design and exploration process.

When you want stereoscopic images, there are a number of methods of working with the program that you should follow to insure that when you find the perfect flame and viewpoint, it will be simple to arrange the camera in the right way to get perfect results. Maybe some future version of the 3D hack can have additional improvements to overcome some of the idiosyncrasies and bugs that currently exist in the program.

Stereo results are fun and wildly rewarding. Obtaining them need not be terribly difficult when you learn some of the tricks. Stay tuned to this blog and website for more information, and most of all, try things for yourself in Apophysis 3D!