how a UF fractal grows. I'm going to upload several images to document for you how I, at least, create a fractal in uf. this one will be a simple spiral with a 3D look to it. this is the graident I used for this image

step 1. choose a formula for the fractal. i'm starting with the mandelbrot though there are literaly hundreds of choices in UF and you can write your own as well.

step 2. switch to julia space

step 3. choose a formula for the area outside of the actual fractal...so i can display the orbits of the pixels as they leave the fractal

step 4. zoom in on a spiral

step 5. copy the spiral so that I now have 2 layers, both identical. then change the formula to color the outside pixels to something else.

choose a method to merge the layers. let's try difference. oh yuck, i dont like that at all.

lets try a different method of merging the layers. how about lighten? well..not bad but it lacks something

alright, try again. let's try hue. ah, that I like. ok save that and post it.

Hopeful that helps, gives you a bit of a glimpse over the shoulder of someone working with UF and maybe gives you an idea of how you can do the same thing by combining your fractal program's output with a paint program to mix the images together.

What about adding a little bit of texture? Either within the Outside Colouring or with an extra texture layer?

:rolleyes::sad:
Joy of Frax

WOW..#7 is cool..What about being more graphic;Showing the buttons and what the screens look like...I am thinking that Patricia could loose steps in this process??We must remember that Patricia doesn't know the interface{layout} of UF..Like what does the screen look like that let's you switch modes{mandelbrought to Julia}???And she is a Mac'er...Where is she by tha way???

A bit of texture would be a good idea, and I'd probalby use a 3rd layer for that. The switch interface is the space bar on the keyboard, it opens up a new window so i can't very well show that. The idea wasn't to give someone that had access to uf a step by step but rather to give someone that DOESNT have uf a good idea of what uf does and allow them to hopefuly their paint programs and fractal programs to do the same thing. i'll post the upr on fractaltalk but anyone not on the list that wants it can email me.

THANK YOU ! Wow.....so that's how you do that?! Now that I see how that initial graph thingee works, I can recall seeing one like it in one of the programs I downloaded (now to figure out which one it was!#!!) but didn't understand at all when it popped up on the screen..... Hope I didn't hit delete! The blending of layers I still can't grasp, even with examples right in front of my nose....sigh. AristaProductionLab steered me to a really great program called 'Phoenix' that just may turn out to be capable of doing some of the stuff you do above....now all I need is a couple of clones of myself to free up some time..... =:^) ( One clone, call her PoserPat, could deal with learning that impossibly complicated app., another could keep improving my Bryce skills and learn Vue, one could work on Photoshop.......And meanwhile, back at the ranch, the alpha Pat (me) could fractalize to her heart's content........ Oh--and I'd need one to do the garden and yard and housework)

that inital graph thinking is really just a bunch of crayons laid next to each other. you decide which colors you want next to each other and then your fractal program uses that to color the fractal. ALL fractal programs will use a graident though some might make it eaiser to modify than others. They have to or you get no colors. the fractal itself isn't all the pretty colors...but there are people in this forum that are a lot better at explaining exactly what a fractal is and what it's not than I am. I'll leave that to them. the blending of layers think of like this: take 2 sheets of paper and lay them on the table. draw a picture on both of them. now lay one piece of paper on the other. when you look at them while they are laying on the table you see just the picture on the top piece of paper but if you pick them up and hold them in front of a sunny window, then look at them, suddenly they both become a little transparent and you can see both images all mixed together. That's what most paint programs will let you do. stack sheets of paper, or layers as they are called, one on top of the other, then mix them together as if you were making the different sheets more or less transparent and letting light shine through them in different ways

Oh my!!!Girl talk!!!Oooo oh look smelling salts!!!

Girl talk? huh? smelling salts? you feeling ok or have you been in the mushrooms again?

The tecnique looks great, but can I ask you a favor? Could you put the images themselves in your gallery, and put links here? It took me 6 minutes to load this thread! I won't have high speed internet available here for at least a month, and I'm sure I'm not the only person on a dialup. Thanks! 8]

Oh yure no fun micheleh..If we put the tutorials in our gallery it will look like poo???Hey Michele you mis-spelled technique..ha..ha.. Hey CW thanks for tha whoopi'n

My keyboard is old, I have to really pound on it sometimes. ;] I just want you to consider that not everyone has a superfast connection. A link to the appropriate image in the gallery would be fine, at least in cases of 5 or more images in a single post.

Y'know, this could be the beginning of a tutorial section for the other 'Fractal App Impaired' like me....? CW, another question--what determines the transparent areas of the fractal designs that are layered? I get the 'layering part' but still don't see how you actually compose the final image. Do you do it in post work? Like in Photoshop? Oooo ....that just reminded me of a tutorial I saw when I first found Renderosity--at the time, most of it was beyond me. But a couple of months of forum and gallery haunting here has expanded my knowledge base amazingly (when you consider that I started with next to nothing, that is!). If I can squeeze in the time today, I'm going to look for it again........It composited at least 2 image layers, one of them the color of fall leaves, if I recall......Anybody seen that one??

how about we take patricia's suggestion Micheleh and turn this thread into a tutorial page of some sort for our forum? If that's not possible I can put it on cyberwizards unless someone else wants to donate space and then post a link. (i dont have high speed either, just regular dial up. get about 48k or so max) in answer to the layering question patricia, ultrafractal is partialy a paint program. so i can do all the post productions work i'd have to do in photoshop right in uf. but for any other fractal program, yea, you'd have to create several different individual fractals, take them all into photoshop, or paintshop or some other paint program and combine them there.

I love the thread, it has good info. Just, if you need to post more images, try to post a link to the image in the gallery. We can break it down into more coherent form later, if everyone wants- sort of a multi-author fractal tutorial.