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Hello all!

I've been playing with Mandelbulb3d for a little while now, and I'm having trouble figuring out how to get the black dots, or black grain off the fractal images. I'd like them to be cleaner, smoother - with less grain. Any ideas on how to get the grain out of Mandelbulb3d fractals?

Thanks!
Michelle

Thanks so much Sockratease,

You're not going to believe this, but that makes sense to me now! If you would have told me that a couple months ago, I would have went.... wha? lol! I get really bothered by the fine lines with jaggy edges. Bigger areas can be blurred out in Photoshop I guess, but there's gotta be a way to get them cleaner. I've been saving all my files, so I'll be able to post some text files here when I get things dialed in a bit more. Workin on it, thanks so much for the info!

Now, if I want to put my fractals on my own server, can I put link them here? That would probably be easier than trying to load them in the gallery. And wouldn't use the extra server space here.

I just made one that looks pretty simple to me, neat - but simple with just a blue background - 17 hours  ha! Figured I'd save the file and name it "choke" for now.

Been coming up with some nice fractals. Found some tutorials in Deviantart for Apophysis, so I might play with that for a few. Take a break from Mandelbulb3d. It's neat stuff to figure out though. Hours go by. One good thing - on render times I get up from the pc and stretch my legs. Clean house, cook, play with the boys, run errands... 

I'd like to share some of my images here, so guess I better go find a decent place to put them.

Thanks!
Michelle

Shoot, and I looked for an "edit" button for the last post - but didn't see one.

Please nevermind the main url of michellebrouse - I haven't figured out what all I want to put on there yet, and just installed WP so far. Just wanted to add a couple fractals on that server so I could link them. One of these days I'll actually work on the website. 

It is never necessary to use such a small raystep if you downscale your render, I think that normally a raystep of 0.2 works fine with a tiny amount of smoothing, and a 1:2 downscale makes the work in 1/3 of the time
The noise is often present in small zones and the rest of the render is ok. In this case, go to postprocess tab and recalculate only noisy zones.

Use only ssao24r for shadow it is much more realistic

I rarely use hard shadows but your choice...

Yeah, I see a lot of people speak of post-work as if it is cheating or something.

Yet layering in Ultra-Fractal is not considered cheating, but if you layer in post work you are a Blasphemer!

Here's a quick example of post work to save time and enhance a project:

I rendered this in under a minute in M3D:



I liked it, but it was too grainy.  Decreasing the raystep multiplier didn't do enough with small decreases which boosted the render time to over an hour at this resolution.

So in 2 minutes of post work, I turned it into this:



I liked it a lot more, and another minute of post work changing hues and saturations got this:



I quite like the results and it took about 3 minutes of post work in ArcSoft's Photo Studio 5  (I shun adobe and don't own photoshop and find it morally offensive when people use the word "photoshop" as a verb!!)  (It's a Noun!)  (and a Very Overpriced Noun at that!!).

Thanks a bunch guys!

That's a nice fractal Sockratease. Love the blue version. I'm not particularly hung up on whether or not to do post work in Photoshop. I like to see how good I can get a fractal in whatever program I'm using to generate it, then LATER I can take fractals in Photoshop and play with them. LOL! One learning curve at a time.  Thank goodness I've been using Photoshop since around 1998. Still learn new things in that program 14 years later. I assume it's the same for learning fractals.

Thanks so much for all the info everyone. Much appreciated. I'll be coming in here and going through each post and trying everything mentioned. Seems I have to read - then try - then read.

Here is an example I just did - with the first one small, and you can see the grain I was talking about:



Then in the second version, you can really see the jagged edges on the "spray lines" in the top half:



Then on the last one, it looks a lot better. I got lucky, and couldn't figure out what the heck I did to smooth it out!



Fun stuff! 

When you use the first button in the 2nd tab, you'll save everything you need (The trade-off is that it takes a little more space on your harddrive, depending on the size of your render, than all other options   ). I always use the third tab to save images, but that's mainly because that used to be the only way to save images in "old" versions of M3D.

As to posting and using of parameter files: My opinion is that if you post them on a board, you're essentially saying: "Hey, I don't care what you do with it. I found them, but I give them to the world and everyone can do as they please with it". Which means that in my book you can render the same parameter set without any modification and post it wherever you like. However, there are people with a different opinion and of course, doing as I propose does not get you any points for originality .

Good point Madman, I doubt just loading parameters is very creative. Takes all the fun out of it anyhow! 

It is great to have something to start with though, because it takes a little time to figure out the program. It's nice to be able to load a parameter in, and get something cool to look at while you figure things out. I found some tutorials at http://www.veengle.com/s/mandelbul%203d.html - so I'm going to watch those now. Can you believe I've never used that navigator yet? Mercy. I had no clue the first button on the save tab saved everything I need too - thanks for the help everyone!