Apodizzy

I’ve been spending more time than I meant to in Apophysis. Downloaded Apophysis-J for the Mac. It doesn’t do everything I would like it to do, but it’s still being developed. It renders a lot quicker than the Apophysis on my old PC.

I gave the Mac something last night which would have tied up the PC for a week, turned my back for 5 minutes, then returned to find it saying it would be finished in 15 minutes. I was almost dismayed… If it does it that fast, it’s hardly worth leaving it to render overnight as people advise. It’ll be done before I’ve finished kicking off my slippers.

Problem is, it doesn’t do transparent PNGs, which I prefer. It’s supposed to be able to, as the setting is there, but maybe it won’t unless I export the flame. Unfortunately I can’t find any clear information on how to set up a flam3 renderer on the Mac.

The information on setting up the Apo-J is a little unclear; it took me a while to figure out how to install the extra plugins! It’s easy with the normal Apophysis because you just put the plugins in a folder in the right location for Apophysis to find them, but Apophysis-J is a different kettle of fish. You have to learn its language and issue your commands in a confident manner before it will do your bidding… or perhaps get the help of a nice bottled genie from somewhere.

Just in case you found this post because you were trying to do the same thing, the following is what worked for me:

1) Run Apo-J
2) Close Apo-J but not the terminal window
3) Into the terminal, type:

cd . apophysis-j/plugins/apophysis
open .

Don’t miss out the single space before each dot. (I hit return after the first line and it waited for me, which was encouraging… up till then it had just been saying “file or folder not found”).
This should open the window you’re looking for (it was called apophysis); put those extra plugins of yours inside.

The mistake I was making to start with was that I didn’t realize there was also a space between the cd and the dot. Once I cottoned onto that, the right folder opened and I poured those plugins in. Next time I ran Apo-J, I looked in Options, Variations tab, and the number of variations had increased from 40 to 81. Success.

Despite the difficulties, it’s fun and I’m enjoying it; the more I learn about it, the more there is to learn… but a challenge is always good, giving us a world of colour and infinite possibilities…

Credit: I based the tiled fractal on this tutorial.
NB: It wasn’t working in Apophysis-J: the image disappeared from the window and other strange things began happening… so I started again in Apophysis 2.08 beta.