Happy Black Friday, all! I hope nobody got trampled or otherwise injured in the frenzied shopping last night or today. I elected to stay home and keep me and my money safe while I recover from too much yummy dinner yesterday. Of course, I also decided to make art to show you all.
Today’s art is brought to you by Apophysis, the free fractal generator. As I have mentioned before, this software offers an infinite variety of fractal images just by fiddling with a few controls. The trick is learning how to use those controls. Happily, there are some really nice tutorials out there, and some very kind, really smart people have created scripts and plugins to help improve your images, and make creating specific types of images much easier and faster.
I’m also learning that, while I don’t always like what I get “out of the box” with some of those scripts, I can use those images as a base for more attractive images, especially now that I understand the controls a little better. All I can say is, give it a try, go through some of the tutorials, play a little, and see what you come up with.
Here are a few of my results from the past several days:
I’m still learning the best settings for rendering and showing off the intricate designs, and truly each design is different. There are some general rules to follow for best results, but sometimes you have to tweak each image to get better results.
Some of these images took several hours to render, even at a small size, which puzzled me since I just bought this 8-core processor. I thought it should be faster. Turns out, there is a setting to enable multi-threading for renders, which vastly improves the time to render. Still, at larger sizes I’m finding that it takes over an hour to produce a high-quality render. But I think it’s worth the wait. Don’t you?
If anyone wants a wallpaper-sized image, just send me an email and let me know which one you want, and your monitor resolution, and I’ll fix one up for you.
