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.

Skill Level: Beginner to Intermediate

Quick Facts

• ApoMap is a unique gradient editor
• Cool RGB Graph editor – could be friendlier to use
• Making smooth gradients from image samples is easy
• Saves gradients as Fractint Map files

The Program Interface

Here are screen shots of the main menus

The File Menu options

The Edit Menu:

Edit Menu options

The Process Menu is perhaps more interesting:

Process Menu Options

These processes help to edit and modify a gradient.

The Graph Editor

Here is an example of a gradient designed in the Graph editor. The picture shows the editor aligned with the gradient to show how the RGB lines correspond to the colors.

Graph Editor in action

Design Process

It can take a few tries to get the colors right, but it is a really basic and easy process.

Green Spike gradient, Step 1

The Graph editor works by drawing one line at a time with any one of the three drawing pens. It only draws straight lines, click a place to start the line and click where it should end. Curves can be made by making many short lines consecutively and changing the angle of each one.

Colors are formed by mixing the amount of each primary color. Red and Green make Yellow, Red and Blue make purple, Blue and Green make Cyan.

Adding Some Interest with a color spike

Grays are made with roughly equal amounts of each color. In this example Red is the first line to be drawn. The other lines are the random gradient generated automatically.

Starting a Gray gradient

Next, trace over the Red line using the Green pen.

Trace over the Red line with the Green Pen

The last step completes the basic Gray gradient.

The Gray gradient completed

Sometimes it is interesting to add a bit of color to the grays just to see where it shows up in the Flame fractal.

Adding Color markers

Saving the Gradients

It is important to save the finished gradients so it will be available whenever it is needed in the future. Alternatively it can be copied to the clipboard and pasted it into Apophysis directly. The new gradient can be saved from either program.

ApoMap saves gradients as Fractint Map files.

Saving Map Files

The Graph editor is small so accuracy can be difficult, especially at the side edges. One way to work is to watch the numbers in the little boxes next to the color pens. The numbers provide a means to know precisely where the the click will take place. The starting number at the left side is 0, and the ending number on the right is 256.

If it is important that a gradient blend smoothly where the end and beginning meet, try the Rotation control in the Adjust panel. Rotate the edge gradient away from the edges, then edit the colors so there is no abrupt change.

Rotate gradient edges towards the center to smooth it

There is a sharp discontinuity where the former edge areas meet up after it has been rotated.

Former edges are discontinuous

Below they have been smoothed out

Gradient now blends smoothly

Skill Level: Beginner

Quick Facts

• Creating sample pictures

• Using ApoMap’s Smooth Palette function

• Converting from Map files to UGR
  

• Download the Gradients
  

Nature Pictures

To start with find a series of nature pictures you like, especially ones that have interesting colors. Most pictures have too much detail which can result in a gradient with too many colors and high contrast. The idea here is to select small parts of these pictures to restrict the gradient process to a more suitable and desired range.

Things to look for

Contrasty pictures have too much difference between dark and light areas. In Apophysis each rendering is usually against a solid background. If that color is dark, the best gradients are mostly light shades. Dark colors on a dark background tend to disappear and not show up. That can produce interesting effects but the bottom line is that the whole fractal is not showing. Obviously light backgrounds require dark shades in a fractal gradient.

Be aware of these requirements as you sample pictures and plan ways to organize the results so it is easy to find the right gradients later. Choose samples from small areas where there is not too great a contrast. Pick out some with light shades, some that are dark, others that are predominantly some color. If necessary reduce the contrast in the sample before saving it.

Sample pictures can be processed to make a Smooth Palette more than once because the method is random and will create different patterns each time.

Bright color source

Start by creating a small selection box on the image. Copy and paste the results into a new image and save them as a JPG or BMP. Go back to the source image and move the little box to a new area and repeat the copy/paste/save routine. Here are the samples collected from this image.

Small Sample Images

Here is the gradient from one of these samples

Orange-Yellow Gradient

Here’s another good source image to sample:

Evening Sky Source Image

And the samples acquired:

Sky Samples

The finished gradients are available as a downloadable zip file. Here are more of the sources and samples:

Mountain Frog Source

These samples include some Frogskin!

Mountain Frog Samples

Grass Samples

River Samples

Sky Samples

Sunset Samples

The sky and Sunset pictures are all from Central Oregon.

Leaf Samples

Making Gradients

Now open up ApoMap and click on the Smooth Palette Button.

Smooth Palette Button

Navigate to your sample images, pick one out then wait for the process to finish. In a few moments a gradient will open up in the program. Save it or copy it to the clipboard for use in Apophysis. Continue making gradients from the samples until there is a good collection of Map files.

A special converter utility called Map Converter.exe will convert all those many single-gradient Map files into a convenient UGR file. Download the utility from Datagram. Place this utility in the same folder as ApoMap – for convenience. Double click to operate the program. Navigate to the list of Map files and check the check boxes for which ones to include, and give it an appropriate name. It works fast and easily.

To use these in Apophysis, go to the Gradient tab in the Adjust panel and find the button to open the Gradient browser. Use that browser to locate the new UGR file and open it up. Click once on a name, or hover the mouse above it to show a sample of the gradient. Double click the gradient name to transfer the gradient into Apophysis.

The finished collection of gradients have been converted to UGR files, along with many more samples than are shown here. They are available on my devArt gallery.

Thanks for visiting!