ApoMap

This little program is helpful in designing your own gradients but it’s not the only way to go.

In the Adjust panel under the Gradient tab there are four small buttons on the bottom right corner. The first one is “copy gradient to clipboard.” The next is “paste gradient from clipboard.” The third one is “open gradient browser.” The last one says “Smooth Palette.”

The first two are pretty self explanatory but it might be helpful to understand the last two. The gradient browser is a handy tool to open and explore previously saved collections of gradients for Apophysis. When you save gradients from the program it saves them in container files called UGR files. Each one can contain a large number of gradients identified with names. It is helpful to organize them so that only similar gradients exist in each one but that’s up to you to organize.

The smooth palette button opens a menu where you can navigate to any bmp or jpg image file. Once you’ve selected an image file, the program will analyze the file and create a new gradient based on colors that it samples at random from the image. For best results, prepare ahead of time by copying just small portions of image files from which to sample. Often a single source image can provide many smaller color samples.

You can use any digital image as a source for gradients, including painting small image files in a graphics program. This gives you a bit more control over the results.

Once the gradient is made, it loads into Apo and your Flame will be painted with the new colors. Remember to Right-click the gradient area and save the gradient in a convenient UGR file.

Gradients can be loaded into ApoMap from the clipboard, which makes it convenient for fine tuning a gradient to match your current flame, or you can design new gradients from scratch by drawing with the RGB tool.

The thing to be aware of is that ApoMap saves gradients in Fractint map files instead of UGR files. There is only one gradient in each map file. The gradient browser can open both UGR and MAP files.  A directory for Map files can fill up with a couple dozen files quickly, but using them in Apo one at a time is not very convenient. To get better organized it’s handy to stuff all those Map files into one or two UGR files.

Datagram has written a handy utility that will do exactly that. It works real well and is very convenient and It’s called the Map-to-UGR-Converter-Compiler.

Planning Ahead

Every time you create a random batch, you might find something of interest either in a random parameter set or for use later. If you don’t care for the pattern, maybe the color gradient is one you might want later. Save gradients that you like in UGR files. Create new UGR files for different purposes – for colors on dark backgrounds, colors on light backgrounds, complex colors, simple colors, predominant colors, etc.

Remember that how a Flame looks with a gradient is not totally due to the gradient itself, but involves how the color settings for each transform that makes up the Flame are set.

The goal is to build a library of cool stuff to work with that is uniquely yours. You liked it, tweaked it, collected and organized it. It’s yours to use as you build custom designs later. If you like, rotate the colors, change the color saturation, contrast, hue or brightness before saving it.

To save a gradient, Right mouse click in the gradient display in the Gradient tab of the Adjust panel, and select the option to “Save Gradient”. Either find a suitable existing UGR file, or enter a name for a new UGR file, click OK. The UGR file is a container for many gradients so the next step is to assign a name to this gradient so it is identified within the container file. Save the gradient.

It can be fun to open ApoMap, which is a gradient editor for Apophysis. It has various functions to change the colors and make them look different. It also has a unique RGB based chart in which you can draw lines that control the percentages of each primary color in the gradient.

One goal of this process is to match up specific color bands in the gradient to regions of a flame image. When you save files in ApoMap results in gradients of the Fractint format with an extension, “.map”. Apophysis can read these files directly, or you can download a conversion program that will change a collection of MAP files into a convenient container UGR file. You can also copy the gradients to the clipboard and paste them into the Gradient tab in Apophysis.

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