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Posted: Fri Jun 02, 2006 12:23 am

Greetings people! Very Happy

I'm going to tell you about this interesting technique which you may have seen in some of my latest works at DA ;)
I think this technique is much fun and does not require much mathematical knowlege Rolling Eyes

Another thing why I'd like to tell you all this is a number of interesting Apo "tricks" which may lead you to some better understanding of what is happening "under the hood" of this wonderful program Smile

The Blob Spirals Tutorial
Copyright (C) 2006 Peter "Zueuk" Sdobnov

Alright, push that "New blank flame" button and let's start!

First, we need one blurry transform. Select xform #1 and set it to "blur".
Using only blur is quite boring though, so you can add a bit of some other variation(s)... Like I did here ;)

Now we're going to create a spiral.
Take xform #2 - it is set to "linear" by default. Good - that's just what we need now.

Scale it up a bit, and rotate - so we get an unwinding spiral.

Our spiral doesn't look so good - it fades out too quickly. Let's fix this - go to the "Transform" tab and set weight of xform #2 to some high value, like 10.

Now the most cool stuff begins! Cool

Add one more transform and set it to "bubble": go to "Variations" tab, reset "linear" to 0 first, then click "bubble" in the variation list and move your mouse until your bubble covers that blurry transform #1.
As you can guess, with this "bubble" we map our unwinding spiral onto a (pseudo-)sphere, creating a neat 3D-"reflection" ;)

And now... The final... Transform! Push the "+FX" button NOW!

In the "Variations" tab reset linear to 0, and add a "julian"=1 instead.
Then go to "Variables" and set "julian_power" to some not-so-high NEGATIVE value, like -2.

Negative values turn your fractal inside-out - and that's just what we need to do with our spiral!
(you could use "spherical" variation here, it works almost exactly like "julian" with power = -1 (and it's faster, btw), but julias are much more powerful... try it and see for yourself ;)

Now move/scale the FX triangle around until you get some interesting view on your spiral Smile

Well, things are looking quite cool now, but... The colors... They're not colorful at all! Sad

Transform #2 has the most heavy "weight", so looks like if I want to change some colors I got to tweak this xform first.
Let's go to the "Colors" tab. I'm going to select xform #2 and tweak it's color a bit...

Hmmm... No good Confused

Too much of the same color in the center. Got to do something about it!
In the "Colors" tab go to the "Symmetry" value and INCREASE it a bit.
(you can do this by holding mouse button and dragging left and right, like in "Variations")

You see, by increasing this value we make our colors change slower. So we get a nice colorful spiral Cool

(Your gradient must be somehow colorful for this ofcourse Smile

By the way, for the flame you see here I used default gradient #422 with gamma set to 2.2 and brightness = 12.5 ;)

Aha!

Talking about "symmetry"... I got another cool trick for you.
Remember our "bubble" transform? Which makes that cool "reflection" effect?
But normal reflections often keep their colors unchanged... And we know how to do it ;)

Select xform #3 ("bubble") and set it's "symmetry" to 1. Niice!

You can tweak some things to get more interesting effects...
- Move/scale/rotate xform #2 (linear) to change spiral's shape. You may need to adjust weight and symmetry values here if you wind up your spiral too much ;)
- Move/scale/rotate "bubble" xform to change appearance of "reflection". You can duplicate it to add another bubble xform for more reflections - try it!
- Move/scale/rotate FX triangle, change it's "julian_power" value - here's an image with power = -3.

Note that I haven't distored any triangles. No need to do that, especially if you want to keep control of what's going on! Cool

But sometimes distorting things can lead to an interesting effect, an example is here... Smile

And now... The Ultimate Secret of the Mighty BLOBs!!!

Can you see it? Twisted Evil

P.S. Please report any weird typos and spelling mistakes! Rolling Eyes

P.P.S. I am currently too lazy (and busy) to make a normal html of this and put it somewhere (like DA)... So let's say that currently this "tutorial" is FracFan-exclusive Cool

P.P.P.S. This means... that if you really want to somehow clean this forum page of all this forum stuff (ie. for printing) - alright, do it, but don't upload it anywhere... Neutral

Send people here instead! Twisted Evil

Posted: Fri Jun 02, 2006 12:35 am

Which roughly translates as "Thank you Thank you Thank you"!!! Laughing

Posted: Fri Jun 02, 2006 1:21 am

Nice tutorial Peter!

Add one more transform and set it to "bubble": click "bubble" in the variation list and move your mouse until your bubble covers that blurry transform #1
(you got to reset "linear" to 0 first, ofcourse)

i saw one typo :)

Posted: Fri Jun 02, 2006 1:38 am

I've been trying to come up with something like this since I saw your first one.

Veryt cool.

Posted: Fri Jun 02, 2006 1:57 am

Great tut Peter and thanks for sharing your knowledge. bowdown

Posted: Fri Jun 02, 2006 2:26 am

Oh, that'll keep us quiet for a while. Thanks you sooooo much!! champagne

Posted: Fri Jun 02, 2006 2:37 am

Nicely written dude

Me------> astonished

Posted: Fri Jun 02, 2006 2:41 am

OMG... after all thes years of using APo i never used or knew there was a "blank flame button" astonished

.. heheheheehe too funny, guess u can teach an old dog new tricks

Me-----> Laughing

Posted: Fri Jun 02, 2006 3:25 am

cool - you shouldn't do them so soon - it will fog the mind Laughing

Posted: Fri Jun 02, 2006 3:32 am

I ADORE YOU!!! lol

THANK YOU for posting that!!! WOW!!!

Very Happy

Posted: Fri Jun 02, 2006 4:07 am

Awesome!!!

Posted: Fri Jun 02, 2006 5:00 am

Add one more transform and set it to "bubble": click "bubble" in the variation list and move your mouse until your bubble covers that blurry transform #1
(you got to reset "linear" to 0 first, ofcourse)

I'm not understanding that one step. HOW is the bubble, the green mesh appearing on screen? What do I have to do to get that?

Posted: Fri Jun 02, 2006 5:05 am

When you have the editor open,click the button that looks like an eye,to the left of the FX button.................Paul

Posted: Fri Jun 02, 2006 5:13 am

OH!!! Wow...learned something lol

THANK YOU!!

Posted: Fri Jun 02, 2006 5:55 am

psion005 wrote:

OMG... after all thes years of using APo i never used or knew there was a "blank flame button" astonished

.. heheheheehe too funny, guess u can teach an old dog new tricks

Me-----> Laughing

:lol:You have NO idea how much better that makes me feel ;-)

Posted: Fri Jun 02, 2006 6:21 am

LMAO!!!

You want to know something stupid? I thought I had a defective version of APO. Everything kept mentioning, like on bubble, hold down your mouse button and then go left or right to scroll the numbers up or down. lol So, all along, I would highlight the number by the name of the variation and try to do that left or right trick, to no avail. Sad

Gee, works wonders when you put your dang mouse on the word!!! Embarassed

Posted: Fri Jun 02, 2006 7:03 am

Thanks Peter for sharing with us one of your spectacular techniques.

We all at FracFan Forum are very happy and recognized for the honor of the exclusive of your toturial.

Thank you.

Posted: Fri Jun 02, 2006 8:17 am

Lots of great information. I have a present for you if you would like. (It's a pdf version of your tutorial). I do not want to post it anywhere without your permission.

Posted: Fri Jun 02, 2006 8:44 am

I would LOVE a pdf version of this. Very Happy

Posted: Fri Jun 02, 2006 10:10 am

Me too.