Chaoscope tutorial
High quality renders
This tutorial will help you to get the best out
of Chaoscope rendering engine. There's little amateur fractalists
will learn from it because what applies to Chaoscope is also
valid for most fractal software.
Finding the right angle
The first thing to consider before rendering is
the view angle.
Attractors are complex shapes by nature so changing the angle
will have a dramatic incidence on the image composition. Some
attractors also look better under certain angles, like highly
chaotic Pickovers. This is a matter of personal taste and talent,
but as a rule of thumb, the attractor should fill at least two
third of the frame.
| fig. 1 : changing the view
angle may affect the brightness distribution |
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| default angle |
custom angle |
Changing the view size
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| fig. 2 : size is now 600*600, angle was
slightly modified so the attractor aspect ratio is closer
to a square. Iterations is the default 20,000,000. |
Your attractor may not fit the default 4/3 frame
ratio (if you decided to adjust) so the next step will be to
change the view size to match the attractor aspect. You can experiment with different
ratios like 1/1, 2/1, 3/2 or even the Golden ratio itself. If
you intend to print your creation and go for a very large size, the only limit to the size
is your available physical memory.
If the attractor doesn't fit within the view (high scale) you
will notice that pixels on the edges appears darker. If you want your picture to
have a specific size and trim the darker pixels off, increase
the height and width by 2.
Choosing the rendering mode
Depending on what you're trying to achieve you
may want to try all five rendering
modes. The Solid mode is a bit limited in 0.3, but it can
be the better choice for some attractors. (i.e.
in the gallery)
| fig. 3 : the five rendering
modes, default iterations for all |
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solid |
| gas |
liquid |
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| light |
plasma |
Picking the gradients
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| fig. 4 : light mode with custom gradients — blue
to orange for speed, blue to red for angle — nice
but dark. |
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| fig. 5 : Same as fig. 4, Brightness=4
and Gamma=3. |
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| fig. 6 : Same as fig. 5, 400,000,000
iterations. Notice how the noise almost completely disappeared. |
If you've chosen Light or Plasma as a rendering
mode, the next step is to pick the right gradients.
This is a long winded process, unless you have a favourite colour
scheme you want to apply to all your renderings. In some cases
Speed and Angle shades are equivalent (located on the same parts
of the attractor) so one gradient is enough. Loading the map
file named black.map will "switch
off" the redundant gradient.
Complex colour maps aren't essential, two colours for each gradient
is sometimes just what it takes. A good example is
which only uses red to blue for speed and green to black for
angle.
An alternative way of picking gradients is using the "Random Gradients" function, bearing in mind random
number generators artistic taste is reputedly limited.
First render
Once you're happy with view angle, size and gradients,
you can start a first render with the default
maximum iterations. Use this render to adjust the mode-specific
parameters, especially Contrast or Brightness
and Gamma for accumulation modes. Light render pixels are
stored in three 32 bits floating point values, a precision you
will never get from a standard bitmap graphic package. Therefore
it is a good idea to keep post-processing enhancements to a minimum.
Stretching a picture is definitely a Bad Thing, compositions
should be planned well ahead. It's always a better idea to reduce
the size of a picture rather than increasing it.
| fig. 7 : improving solid rendering |
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| 2 billions iterations, no post-processing |
1800*1800 render sized down to 600*600, thus obtaining
a 3*3 anti-aliasing |
Final render
Once you are ready for the final render, increase
the maximum iterations by at least one order of
magnitude (200,000,000 is usually sufficient although very large projects will require more), change
the number of updates to 1 and press F4. Once the image is rendered,
you can make fine adjustments to mode specific parameters
before saving your image.
Things to remember
- Choose the view angle carefully
- Don't limit yourself to a single rendering mode
- Default view size and gradients are not optimal in most cases,
change them
- all adjustments that can be made in Chaoscope shouldn't
be made later using a bitmap graphic software
- Never stretch a picture
- when you shrink a picture down, divide both width and height
with the same integer number
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