Tag Archive: tutorial


New Mandelbulb 3D and tutorial

I was out of it for some time and went to check if there was a new version of Mandelbulb 3D as the newest versions I had were just mostly for bug fixes… there is, with a lot of new formulas. There are so many new things to explore combined with the time I stopped using it that I had to almost relearn it from scratch, and I decided to check if someone had finally made a tutorial for it, and I found this one that covers pretty much the basics but it’s very well written and clear.

It’s not just one of these with screen captures of the software windows, it goes a little beyond than that although it still doesn’t explain much about the formulas and what are their possibilities and how their parameters should or could be set, which is something that most fractal softwares still lack. They just pretend everybody knows the deep math involved, and they forget to explain how to find at least a starting image using a specific formula so we can explore it from that point onwards. It’s very frustrating to find that there’s a new formula in your collection but you have no idea where to start and how to change the parameters to get something interesting. UF has changed it a bit with the addition of the “explore” feature, which is good to find what a certain parameter does without typing random numbers until something happens…

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Mandelbulb compositions?

From my few experiences with the Mandelbulb, most of the images I could make so far that didn’t look like something that has been done by other fractal artists or that don’t look too much like other fractals remind me of coral reefs. A lot of them, actually. Or it’s a coral reef or it’s a futuristic building. Not bad, because I am not really stuck or am being forced into a certain picture style neither I have the need to make just common 3D fractal images by the dozens (that many other people are doing anyway), but it would be very interesting if there was a way to import some other 3D objects (non-fractal stuff) into that, like for example… fish.

This could lead though to a lot of cheesy mixed images like some we see at these online communities, with odd Poser nude girls mixed with colourful fake landscapes done in Bryce and some Apophysis things scattered here and there for a final touch, but if used right and done right, it would make things very interesting in this new 3D realm.

Also in images like these futuristic cities some other details could be added – spaceships, “cars”, fractal trees, people, ETs… again, without making it look too much like some of these furry porn characters, that look more like a bad acid trip than something really creative and ingenious.

There is a way to import background pictures in Mandelbulb 3D, but these are useful only to create sky textures I suppose, with a few planets and clouds. If there was a way to add actual 3D objects, things would get a bit more interesting sometimes, if one wants to move a bit away from the chaos and fractals and the random abstract things. In these reef images for example, 3D fish or other critters could really make the images very interesting. But again, purists would cry their hearts out saying it’s not a fractal (it isn’t… nobody said it was in the first place!).

I’ll start posting some of these images as soon as I have about half a dozen of them, maybe they will have their own galleries as they are of a different kind of fractals. I need to get better with the software first, I’m having some difficulties to understand its rendering parameters and I’m getting some images with artifacts and grains and other unwanted things that are ruining some possibly interesting images. As there still aren’t good tutorials on Mandelbulbs, I’m still lost and going on my own.

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The Fractal Factory, once more

I was bored and started to look for fractal tutorials. And of course, I ended up at Deviant. Then I found this (sorry) hilarious tutorial for Apophysis.

Hopefully this person could have changed his/her mind about the process of creating a good fractal as it seems that this tutorial was written in 2005, but from what you can get from this tutorial, it’s all “random, random, random + luck” the ingredients you need to make a decent Apophysis image.  Ah, and patience as well. Forget about understanding how to use the several edit features, just wait and maybe one of your 1000 randomly-generated images will be worth the posting at one of these sites.

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I’m officially old.

Here goes another rant.

As I’ve been a little away from the fractal world for the past years, I am doing some updatings on my pretty old fractal links and lists of resources and I’m trying to find new stuff like tutorials, galleries, etc. that might be appearing here sometime as most of my old links like that seem to be dead. So I went to look for “UF tutorials”. “OK. Here are some. Let’s try this one at DA” I said.

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It’s quite simple, really. So simple I won’t even post pics. And I’m assuming you are slightly familiar with Photoshop or some other editing software that is capable to use layers so I’ll skip the part where others teach you how to create text and all that stuff you should already know. OK, let’s go. This is how I make all my watermarks, BTW.

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