Your Fracfan account has been activated now my friend... I'm on the opposite side of the planet here, and the time zone differences are a doozy... thank you for your patience...

Check out Claire Jones' tutorials too - well written, well researched, and she makes suggestions of things to try for different effects also.

Gradient choice will have a fairly large influence of flame detail too... I've been known to spend hours finding just the right gradient to bring out small details in some of my images... grin

I'll definitely check out Tara's tutorials - I could do with a refresher course... lol!

T.

The basic Technica workflow is as follows...

1. In editor window, click on "new blank flame"
2. change the variations on transform 1 to Linear = 0 and Disc = 1
3. change the variations on transform 2 to Linear = 0 and Julian = 1
4. chane the variables on transform 2 to Julian Power = 4 and Julian Dist = -1
5. change the weight (transform tab) of transform 1 to 2.5
6. change the weight (transform tab) of transform 2 to 3
7. scale down transform 1 to about 0.5 or 04 of it's original size
8. scale down transform 2 to about 0.2 or 0.3 of it's original size

You can also do the same workflow but substitute Juliascope for Julian with the following workflow...

1. In editor window, click on "new blank flame"
2. change the variations on transform 1 to Linear = 0 and Disc = 1
3. change the variations on transform 2 to Linear = 0 and Juliascope = 1
4. chane the variables on transform 2 to Juliascop Power = -250 and Juliascope Dist = 10
5. change the weight (transform tab) of transform 1 to 5
6. change the weight (transform tab) of transform 2 to 0.25
7. scale down transform 1 to about 0.5 or 04 of it's original size
8. scale down transform 2 to about 0.2 or 0.3 of it's original size

Tom's Technica scripts aren't working in Apo 2.04 - some of the scripting commands  were changed  in 2.05 and 2.06 ... which was when these scripts were written.

Try the above, and then play with some final transform additions - Spherical gives some nice effects if you move the Final Xform around a bit...

T.

Sharp flames.... that's a hard one sometimes... it depends on the variations you are using too. Scaling transforms is probably the most effective way of sharpening - lots of trial and error involved, tweaking triangles until you are satisfied with the result.

I have my main window quality set to 25 - so if a flame looks pretty good at that quality, it's gonna look VERY nice when rendered at say 500 or 1000 quality.

The reset location thing doesn't work very well sometimes, and I don't know why... grrr! But all is not lost... in the Adjustment window, Render tab, there is a wonderful little thing called Master Scale... increase that and the image will get larger - in the 2.04 version, if you double click on the words Master Scale it will reset to 32 - and you can change the numbers manually as well. Don't go too high, or your flames will lose a bit of definition - I find that scales of 50 or less give me the best results. For finer detail at closer zooms, use the Zoom function instead of Master Scale...

Questions are good my friend... you ask as many as you need to, OK?

T.

Attached Link: Fracfan Forums

"Fractscient" at Fracfan forums may be able to help you out - check out his posts at the link above - he is also known as "Fred E" on the Apophysis mailing list. Be prepared for a lot of reading - he can be a little verbose... lol!

"Gygrazok" wrote the version of Apophysis you are using, so he may also be able to help with pointers for that particular version http://gygrazok.deviantart.com

T.

I have the feeling that this forum will be one of THE places to hang out at... definitely worth checking out!

T.

No debt required my friend... I live to help, OK?

Just make sure you post your masterpieces... grin

T.

This one I can fix... lol!

You need to get into the Windows Display Settings (right click anywhere on the desktop and select Properties)

Select the Settings tab, then find the Advanced button and click it.

You need to change the DPI setting to "Normal size (96DPI)", then Apply the setting.

The next time you open Apo after doing the above, you should be able to see all of the tabs available in the Editor window...

T.

Maddy,

When you open the render window and input your values, try limiting the memory to 128, and then just click on Render - it will work fine, and the dialog should tell you that it's going to render 5 "slices", OK?

T.

No problem my friend... always happy to help out where I can... lol!

T.

You need to lower the memory limit so that the render will use less of it...

T.

Attached Link: Apophysis 2.04 zplus

Enjoy!

T.

The message is telling you that you don't have enough free RAM to do the render in a single "slice" - but this can be easily fixed...

In the Render window, you need to put a check in the "Limit memory usage to" box - then allocate an appropriate amount of memory to use for each slice by selecting it from the dropdown box.

Let us know how you go, OK?

T.

It is always my pleasure to help out Quest.

I'll talk to the developers/programmers about seeing if they can make the next Apo upgrade more compatible with older versions of Windows too, OK? I'm pretty sure it has to do with the coding relating to being able to use more than 1gb RAM to render with, and it should be possible to code an IF statement somewhere to recognise Windows versions that haven't got the large memory function, and bypass the subroutine...

Joel's Apo 2.04 is a really nice version though, and you aren't missing out on too many of the new functions that are available in 2.06 - a few of the new functions still have small bugs anyways... lol!

I have a copy of Gygrazok's 2.04zplus here that still works fine - it has a few more variations than Joel's version - just holler if you want me to upload it to my server for you to download and try, OK?

T.

Looks like you don't have a lot of RAM free to do the render properly...

The "out of environment space" error is known to Microsoft, and they have a fix for it at the following webpage

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/230205

Try that, and see if it helps your images process better in Flam3.

What happens if you try to use the internal Apophysis renderer - the little yellow cog thing on the main window??

T.

Hmmm... I just loaded up Joel's Apo 2.04 and rendered a .png file with transparency using both Flam3 and the internal Apo renderer (little cog icon on main screen) - both opened just fine in my PSP v9 - showed transparency perfectly...

Apophysis outputs the transparency setting in an alpha channel in the .png file - maybe there is a setting in Photoshop 7's options that you need to set to get the transparency to show properly?

The latest functions.asc can be found at http://apophysis.wikispaces.com/Scripts-Utilities

The problem with Apo 2.06 and older versions of Windows (98 and ME) appears to be related to the programming within the Apophysis code to take advantage of more than 1Gb ram while rendering... unfortunately, this is going to take a new version of Apophysis to be written before that can be fixed...

T.