Latest Entries »

The tweaks, a first test.

Ok, this is a test. It is the first attempt to post the Ultrafractal tweaks I’ve been making for a while now. This image from 2002 (!) was titled “3d African mask”, and it used to look like this.

Now… it looks like this:

This post might be edited later a few times… the default watermarks created by the gallery manager aren’t showing up, as the image was posted individually and not as a part of a gallery.

All the new images are being rendered in .PNG format, no compression at all (to avoid loss of quality and details) and have a maximum size of 3000px. And… they are HUGE this way. This one, for instance, is 13Mb and probably some will be even bigger. Definitely a waste of bandwidth. I will think about it… maybe I’ll convert them all to JPEGs (obviously keeping the PNGs for printing or something), or post at a reduced size but big enough to display all the details – some images don’t have these details and won’t need to be that big, I suppose. If I can manage a way to convert all these images at once to a different and smaller format, I think I’ll use these instead. Maybe I have to finish all the tweaks or split the tweaks in folders and convert a few at a time. So far I have already 310 new images…

Related Images:

An idea…

While browsing briefly the tweaks of my old images I had an idea… instead of making galleries with n images on them (which is boring to make and manage and doesn’t make certain images to be noticed) I was thinking that maybe I can post all the images one at a time – again, those that are interesting, not all of them – in a dedicated post for each one, with a link to the “original” image (sometimes), citing their old names and maybe giving them a new name and also making some comments on that image suggesting that some parts of it can look interesting (and there are many of these in almost every image) and maybe include these “updates of the updates” with renders of these new unexplored spots in the same post, who knows…

Related Images:

New stuff, when?

I’m still deleting old images that are ugly or irrelevant. It’s interesting that the newest galleries (with stuff  as old as 2010!) are those that have the images that I think that are or ugly or useless. Boring and uninspired, from a bad period.
Hopefully these small updates will make the page alive again… then it can deserve some updates, with the newest images and these tweaks of the old ones.
Also something I’ve noticed is that a lot of the images done with Apophysis look “outdated” and simple, not really any worth in posting most of these. As I’ve never tried like some (famous, in blogs and communities) artists to make some complicated compositions with a zillion layers and a lot of post processing, all my Apophysis images are way too “simple” and not very interesting. The Jwildfire images on the other hand are slightly more interesting.

Related Images:

About AI

I will never publish images altered or created with any sort of AI. As I’ve mentioned a lot of times, I don’t even like to make simple manipulations in Photoshop (except to correct some imperfections or sharpen an image occasionally but it’s very rare), and it’s not different with AI. If I use it, it’s obviously not my own creation. It’s as simple as that. There are many beautiful images done with that, but it’s not my cup of tea. They remind me of these ugly images in Renderosity or other communities where people were mixing fractal images with Poser or other softwares, the results were awful. Digital art, yes, but ugly ones.

Related Images:

Still updating…

It’s a mess over here, plus I forgot how to edit many things in WP. I might be (again) changing the galleries to something smaller and with less images, and with more subdivisions. Having 2934752 galleries don’t make sense, neither a giant one with all the image does… It’s not an easy task to add descriptions, tags, etc. to all these things. It’s actually pretty boring and confusing. Chaos at its best. For a start, I’ve changed the theme of the site, but I won’t be making any further customizations to that. No thanks. There will be a few mistakes here and there.

There are at least 300 new images that should/could be added (just those made with JWildfire), and a few months ago just for fun I decided to finally update my Ultrafractal copy (it’s still too expensive!) and I started re-rendering all my saved parameters, tweaking them as much as possible but keeping the original names. Some of these original images were really awful and silly and meaningless (what was I thinking?) and might be still here, but some will be defintely be zapped. Some of the tweaks changed them for better or at least to something entirely different, which was something very interesting to do. I also rendered them all in a much bigger size and resolution, as now it’s not as slow as before. Some of these images might have been made when it almost became a daily task to make 10 fractals or more every day, which is what made me stay away from them for a long time (10 years?) after a while. Creating fractals was never a job for me, but it almost became one. And the quality went downhill when this started to happen. Even in this “tweaking process” I was a bit too focused again after some time, I was redoing about 5 or more images a day which was not what I was planning. Then, again, I stopped before it was too late. But I could remake about a year or so of old parameters, there are many more to come. Someday.

Also I checked the links section, and a lot of sites are now gone, unfortunately. I guess with the social media people have gone away from traditional websites where you could find a lot of information about your favourite subjects, now it’s just instant “likes” that matter, the contents are forgotten the next day. It’s been difficult to find new ones that are interesting. I am still posting a few of my images on a fractal group on Facebook, but not as often. I’ll try my best to keep updating this site regularly and see what happens, if having a website is still worth it these days.

Related Images: