Flame on

Following the example of a couple of people on the UF mailing list, I wanted to try using an Apophysis-generated flame as an imported image. Flames, being of course fractal, tuck themselves rather neatly into the overall composition, and function more or less as texture. It seems like a good way to add a certain depth and complexity of color without piling up an unwieldy number of layers or adding a lot of slow-rendering distortion algorithms to the basic trap.

Gosh, this means I'm going to have to open up Apophysis again, and try to remember which bits I'd worked out how to use, and make some stuff to use as components. That would solve one of my ongoing difficulties with flame fractals, actually, which is that I'm never able to decide how they should be cropped, or how much of the edges should be visible. As a finished image, a flame often looks a little isolated and weird when the entire form is surrounded by an area of solid color. But zooming them is problematic, and I'm always sad to lose the overall shape of the thing; they have a kind of satisfying completeness when you can see how all the parts fit together into a coherent entity. As a plugged-in image trap, that wholeness would be an advantage.

untitled [flame trap test]


The flame I used in this one was almost perfectly circular, so it's not actually all that useful a test. But I didn't have one with a more irregular shape handy, because all my existing renders are too carefully cropped and zoomed. That'll teach me to try and frame things artistically.

How much is too much?

My misgivings about the potential uses of the image importer are sorting themselves into two basic categories, thusly:

1. It's too easy.
2. It's too hard.

Unhelpful, that. The easiness is simply that once you learn the basic technique, there's nothing at all to stop you from dropping any image, or dozen images, into any fractal. This results in both a sort of whee, fun! effect, and the usual vague disquiet common to fractal art, the part that says this is way too easy and fun; I'm just sitting here pushing buttons, it can't possibly count as anything serious.

The hard part, though, is that you have to be careful about which pictures you use. They need to be fairly high resolution, even for a smallish screen-sized render, because the distortions introduced by the orbit trapping tend to magnify certain bits enormously, and the resulting pixelation can be quite noticeable. Once you have your high-resolution image, it has to be very carefully cleaned up in Photoshop (or equivalent) to get the alpha channel tidy. Even if the pixelation isn't a problem in the main part of the imported image, the edges can start looking ragged very quickly.

So in addition to needing some substantial background in using Ultra Fractal, you also need a reasonable familiarity with some graphics editor. And this is even before getting into questions of the aesthetic merit of the resulting conglomerations. Fractals are inherently complex things, and adding photographs to them is a whole new and different kind of complexity. A photograph of a single-colored object is never a single color; it has highlights and shadows and reflected colors from the surrounding environment, it has variations introduced by the lighting and noise from the film grain or CCD. It's made up of hundreds or even thousands of variations on the general palette, in shadings that may or may not be smooth. By comparison with photographs, I've been finding it kind of amazing to realize just how smooth and orderly fractals really are. In trying to combine the two, keeping the look and feel of the whole image consistent becomes more difficult because the intrinsic textures are so dissimilar.

I worry that the easy factors combined with the hard factors will produce an end result of many pictures made with little attention to the technical details. Heh, and having typed that, I realize that it's a perfectly good description of all fractal art, and indeed most digital art in general. Easy to do, not necessarily easy to do justice to. I should probably stop worrying about it, and just keep experimenting. Because, hey, whee fun!

I can follow up yesterday's introductory noisemaker with a full orchestral performance on the

Illuminated Musical Contraption


It may be worth pointing out that I have actually kept this one quite controlled. The color palette is restricted to a blue-orange-yellow split complement, and the overall composition is structured around a couple of major vertical arcs. However, in spite of my attempts at restraint, the effect is more or less completely ZOWIE BLAMMO, and the thing looks it should play a selection of Raymond Scott's greatest hits.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN

NOW APPEARING!

* The Wonderful Fractalodeon *
in full life-like color

The Like of Which has Never Previously Been Displayed.

Flourish


Baffles even the most learned
Professors
&
Men of Science.
Actually it seems to have put the Professor to sleep. Probably I should give the ballyhoo a rest, too. I am indebted to Wikipedia for the use of their French horn.

A light bulb

Today I tried using the image import feature, for the first time since my couple of brief experiments when UF5 first came out. I'm still substantially intimidated by it, mainly because it adds such a large new dimension of possibilities to an already overwhelming number of choices. How in the world can I ever manage to decide what pictures I need infinitely many of?

I've gotten used to the idea of fractals being, for the most part, purely abstract. They don't necessarily need to mean anything, they just need to be arranged in pleasing compositions of color and shape. The thing about importing images is that it instantly changes the picture from abstract and non-threatening to concrete, specific, nailed-down and potentially fraught with meaning. Suddenly I have to think about concept, which I am exceedingly wary of. It's the sort of thing required by art school, and beloved of the kinds of artists I really dislike. I don't want my stuff to turn into Political!Art! all full of sleek graphical representations of talking-heads-of-state or Hitler's brain on drugs or what have you.

Except that I've also spent a fair amount of time in the last several months making fractals that are definitely illustrations, and approach something like recognizable. Sometimes I even have a concept in mind, much as I might hate to admit it.

So I figured it was time to drag out some of my favorite recurring motifs, the ones I'm comfortable with, and put them into fractals to see what they do. I started with this light bulb.

A Light Bulb



A Julia set introduced some nice distortions, making the shape more globe-like. But it's still quite recognizable, and not terribly interesting except that it makes kind of a good dark/light pattern.

Julia Bulbs



I had another fractal window open, with a different picture I'd been working on, an Ikenaga Roots-Mandel. So I tried pasting the image trap into one of the layers, and ended up with something like a steam-powered carpet slipper.

Brass Slippers



This one seems cheerfully bizarre enough that I'd like to pursue it further, and maybe add some layers with more images: say, a tuba or something. It would be fun to see if I could make some really ridiculous fractal contraptions. Or, y'know, talking-heads-of-state.

Playing

The cute fuzzy cats go all surreal and melty when you stick them in a fractal.

A Meditation on the Nightmares of Goldfish


I still can't decide whether image importing is just inherently cheesy, or if there might be circumstances in which it would become acceptable. And on the other hand, it's quite easy to make cheesy terrible things without importing any images at all.

8-bit


The pre-processing of the cat and fish was done in Photoshop. The video game fractal gives a tip of the hat to Wikipedia for providing me with a screenshot of the original Pac-Man, but all the parts of it were made using various orbit trap colorings, which means I could (in theory) render it enormously large without any loss of image quality. Not that I can think of any reason I'd want to.

Morphology

Hooray, I'm all properly registered now, and messing with the image importing feature. I used a picture of a pretty butterfly, just because I'm in that kind of mood. And because I didn't have a picture of a fluffy kitten handy.

untitled [morpho swarm]



The base for this one is a phoenix formula. The imported butterfly image is quite large, such that I could probably render the fractal big enough to do a decent print. With this remarkable ease of image inclusion, it seems like one major implication is that the possibilities for all sorts of illustration are dauntingly vast. The fractal can become something much more like collage, with enormous potential for surrealism even beyond the already dreamlike quality of the algorithms themselves. The main thing, I suppose, is that now it's very easy to include literal recognizable content. The fractal is no longer a pure abstraction, but can be crammed full of symbolism and allusion and who knows what all.

So beyond knowing about how to assemble the fractal layers into the effect I want, now I need to think about what outside elements to include. It might mean taking photographs, Photoshopping them in various ways, getting them ready for their eventual placement. I could think of it as pre-processing.

I am...intimidated. I thought I didn't know where to start, but now I've started and I don't know which direction to go next.

New toys

I downloaded the evaluation version of Ultra Fractal 5 a couple of days ago. Man, I really wanted to not like it. I was all set to look at the latest upgrades and improvements, and say "Bah, I don't need any of these flashy new bells and whistles! I tried importing images a couple of times and could never get them to look properly integrated with the rest of the fractal." I was suspicious of the changes to how the coloring algorithms worked. I've been quite happy with UF4, and I could have just kept using it, but of course I was curious, so I thought I'd give the new version a couple of days of testing, to see how bad the learning curve would be.

And then, to my combined dismay and delight, it rocked.

The new separation of, say, general Orbit Traps method and actual trap shape makes the whole thing much more flexible. I love that you can copy and paste just parts of the coloring, to transfer them from one layer to another. I especially love that you can copy and paste attributes to multiple layers at a time; I used to do a lot of exploring where I'd get a number of layers in a good combination, and then decide I wanted to see what that combination looked like on a different Julia set, and have to copy and paste the Julia seed (or even a whole different formula) one layer at a time. It was slow and tedious, and now it's a simple couple of clicks.

I'm still kind of meh about the whole image importing business. The way it works now is really slick, and so I imagine I might spend more time in the future dropping in different images, to see if any of them worked better than my past experiments, but I suspect it's just not my style. My favorite bit of tinkering so far is very silly indeed: I was thinking about the question of importing an image with sufficient resolution to do a large print render, and it occurred to me that extreme low-resolution might be an interesting option instead.

Navigating the Internet


This uses, er, some Barnsley formula or other, with the new and improved orbit traps. The anti-aliasing is generally lousy, because this is a crummy resized screenshot instead of a proper render. I get to agonize now about whether I can manage to afford to register the wretched program and be able to do renders again, or if I should just go back to UF4 for now. Grr, stupid moving expenses. Stupid unexpected car repairs. Maybe next month; I should be a little less broke by then.