The idea of fractals has always been fascinating to me. A kernel that creates its own life, it creates its own universe from a mathematical algorithm.
I searched out different software and found only a variety of pretty lame programs. They were only capable of generic looking images, but a new search term popped into my Google vocabulary.. “open source”. With this new search concept, I found a program called “Apophysis“. Its really pretty fantastic. It opens up a world of rich shapes ad colors.
This program has no documentation of substance. And the stuff I found online, eigther has too many numbers for me to understand or is completely obvious. So, I’ve been breaking it down piece by piece.
Moving around the triangles
This is the first fractal I made:
It is really only a slight modification of a randomly generated flame. It was my first experiment of moving around the triangles. Its kind of a cool shape. My goal though, is to really understand what I’m doing.
Linear Flames
The approach I’ve been taking to learning how to use Apophysis is to focus on one type of permutation at a time. Linear is the first on the list.
First Linear based Fractal:
This is kind of cool looking, and I made it by tweaking two linear shapes relative to the unmoving, reference shape. This type of shape pops up a lot playing with Apophysis. So, its really nothing special. Getting those nice solid shapes is tricky. They seem to go to lines by default.
This one has lots of lines:
A practice grid shape:
With a firmish understanding of how linear fractals work, I moved on to making something a little more unique. The colors came from a painting (courtesy of Google Images) which Apophysis melted down into a gradient palette:
Original (pre-Photoshop cheating):
