You know the problems with big renders of flame fractals in Ultra Fractal, so I have heard something about rendering flame fractals in Bryce, but i don't know how or even if it's possible... Can somebody help me with that? thks,

What do you mean by big renders? Do you mean for printing purposes? If this is the case then I would say no. I just spent the last 30 minutes playing with flames in Bryce and the only thing I can really say is that the bigger you make the finished image the more it looks like blurry crap. Even changing the finished size from 3000x2250 at 72dpi to 3000x2250 at 300dpi didn't make any difference. It still looks like blurry crap. Bryce is great if you want to change the flame in some way, incorporate it into a 3D scene or turn it into a material. For trying to make bigger renders of basic flames it isn't really an option though. Maybe I missed something when I was testing it and someone else knows how to do this. I don't use Bryce in this way so i'm not 100% sure. Or try asking in the Bryce Forum...

well, I think you have aswered pretty well my question, so what seems clear is that there are no method for rendering big pictures of flames (and I mean for printing purposes) until Ultra Fractal software doesn't implement it... and all one can do with flames and Bryce is just playing with textures, materials and so on, the way as you, MidDayCrisis have proved to do with great taste!

By the way is "flame " an ad on to UF 3 ? I don't see it as a function.

Flame is a type of fractal most people use a program called Apophysis to create them and then render them in Ultra Fractal. Only trouble is I can't remember the address of the web site, LOL. Maybe someone else can post it...

The biggest flame size I could get is about 40cm (there's a post with the subject "printing flame fractals" or something), but at 150 dpi - enough I think. I didn't print it that big yet, but on the screen it doesn't seem that it was too affected. I did a print in 300dpi of a flame in A4 size, and I think that if I had printed a 72dpi version of the same image, there wouldn't be much differences (the image is "Woosh"). For more "blurry" flames like "Woosh", it's possible to render them (actually export them) in 150dpi then try a little resampling in Photoshop to make them slightly bigger.

Ultra Fractal 3Apophysis

Flames are a variant of IFS fractals. Apophysis is a tool for designing flame fractals, which you can then paste into UF (since flame formulas have been written for UF). The advantage to pasting them into UF is you can layer them in UF along with other fractal formulas, and in theory render them at larger sizes.

The problem is that because of the way flame fractals are generated, the computer needs to have enough memory for the entire image. With other types of fractals, you can render an image bigger than you have memory for, because only a part of the fractal needs to fit into your computer's memory at any one time. But the flame technique (just because of how flames work) needs to fit it all in memory at once, so if you try to render a really big flame, you need lots of memory. If you have lots of flame layers, this becomes even more difficult.

This is why people say you can't render flames large enough for print. There are some other issues, such as flames looking slightly different on the large render (again, because of how flame fractals are generated), so flame prints aren't easy.

--Damien

Thanks a lot for your explanations Damien.