start picture

[Terry50]

Hi,   

I am very new to this.   
1)  Can you use your own imported picture to fracture?
2)  If I can't use my own picture,   how do I reduce the randomly automated picture down to bare bones material?

Thanks a lot,     
Terry

[Sockratease]

Hello and welcome to the forums  

I'm not sure I understand what you are asking here.

First, what software are you using?

Next, I'm not sure you understand what fractals are.  There is no "start picture" as such, it's an equation.

The classic Mandelbrot set is generated by iterating the equation Z = Z^2 + C and then varying the locations on the graph you find interesting.

There are various "transforms" and "mapping" tricks to get different looks and effects.

I think you want to do things like my old favorite use for Fractal Generators - specifically; taking pictures of the woman I love and mapping them to orbit traps and that sort of thing, getting results like this:



Or this:



Which can then be animated like this:

http://vid106.photobucket.com/albums/m278/sockratease/slices2.mp4

Those are old ones, done on an old program.

Each program that can do this  (and not all can)  has it's own way of going about it.  Those were made in Mutatorkammer because I found it easiest to get interesting results from when using images.

It's old and unstable.  It never made it out of Beta testing!  But the Beta version can be found in our Downloads section if you are brave and willing to use old software that crashes sometimes on newer operating systems.

ChaosPro (free), and UltraFractal (paid) can both do things like that, but I never got the hang of really getting any variety from them.  Most of what I did looked the same.  So I still pull out Mutatorkammer once in a while when I want to do this sort of thing.

As for 3D Fractals, that gets tricky.  You're basically using the image as a light source and can get results like this:



As for the second question, what do you mean by "reduce the randomly automated picture down to bare bones material?"  Being a mathematically generated image, the only thing I think that could mean is to remove all coloring and mapping to get the "pure" graphical representation of the formula.  Can you elaborate on that part?

[Terry50]

Hi   
Thanks for responding!
For the first question, you are on the right track.  The picture of your girlfriend example.
I have a kaleidoscope program that inserts any JPEG you may have.
Yea,  I just wanted to load a picture and see what the program can do.   

As far as the second question,  I was watching a video about Architect 4.
There was an edit page where they had a list of transforms which as a whole made up the picture.
But you could turn many of the transforms (layers) off  so you can have one left and then select it and edit it without editing the other layers.     

But I don't know whether you can pick one simple transform and let it run  or   you have to let all the transforms run as a whole.
Because only one transform is only one part, it is much simpler.   

I'm going to have other things going on in the music video also...  So I didn't want the fractal to be the main highlighted part.

Thanks for helping,
Cheers,
Terry   

[Sockratease]

Glad it helped!

If you choose a program, feel free to ask specific questions about how to get the results you want.

But be aware that the formulas used to generate fractals may not be able to give the results you have in mind.  With this type of stuff I find it's better to just play around until you find something that you like, and see how flexible it is.  Not all great looking stills will animate in a pleasing way.

I never heard of Architect 4 but whatever software you wind up using should have a user group, or even just a few people who can help if you look hard enough  (I may be the only person in the universe who still uses Mutatorkammer regularly!).

Good luck, and feel free to post your experiments and/or final results, in our gallery