Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1837646

Apophysis was popular because it was new and everyone wanted to have a go but the novelty has worn off now, and everyone has gone back to the much more versatile and creative UF, FE or XD etc.
Everyone realised the one major problem with Apophysis...

There are no new flames, just variations of old ones. It's taken about 3 years but it has finally sunk in.

Check out the link for a bit of nostalgia.

P.S. Harmen, I love ya, man. Edited for my love for Harmen.

Message edited on: 03/04/2006 07:41

Wow, I was a jerk back then. I've mellowed in my old age, but I might still be a jerk, just an older one :) As you can see, this is just one of many discussions that we have had on this topic. I'm sure that it will happen again. A new member of the Church of the Apophysals for Flame Purity will come along and in their newfound religious zeal proclaim that flames are the only true fractal art on the face of the whole earth. I'll say it again. I love flames (Harmen is OK too :)). Some of my most popular images were built with them, but they are just one piece of the big picture. Tony, welcome back.

Just a small comment - I think some Apophysis users object to the pushing forward of UF simply because they like Apo because it is free but are somewhat prejudiced towards UF as it is not :-) As to compatibility - in my opinion the writers of the Apo betas should produce an equivalent beta formula for UF every time they make a change (instead of relying on other formula authors) - that's what I'd do if modifying the Apo source - and all changes should be 100% backwardly compatible in both Apo and UF. When I get chance (and I get fed up of improving my UF 3D formulas) I'll get back to the IFS stuff I was writing for UF and do a flame version of the beta formulas I did previously as well as probably some 3D IFS stuff. I've even got an idea how to use the Inverse IFS method to produce something closer to flames which would allow fast rendering of flames under zooming (paticularly useful for animation).

Alright, Dave - that sounds GREAT! I can almost hear the trumpet sounding the cavalry charge! :-?) Rick

Anyone else who'd like to do something along the same lines is welcome to a copy of the (beta) formula I was working on for doing IFS and (limited) recurrent IFS - the formula includes all 3 ways I know of rendering IFS/RIFS - the random method, the deterministic method and the inverse method - but if you're going to use any algorithms/ideas from my beta code in Apophysis please create appropriate formulas for Ultrafractal to go with the Apo version.

To Makinmagic- hear hear to the compatibility. i myself am sort of mad at the 2.03c version becuase of that. conversely, why can't we pull UF images into apo and play with them that way? i find working with transforms to be much easier than working with numbers and functions. wouldn't that be great? also: when you import a flame into UF, why can't you add mappings and "inside/outside coloring" formulas like with any UF-only images? that's my question. i'd love to play around with some of my flames by using the "inversion" mapping, but i am restricted to making a new transform with spherical as a variation, and then turning the weight up to like, 50.