chaotica by lyc

UPDATE: please grab the latest version of chaotica from chaoticafractals.com [link]

[original description follows]

after many years of working on ad hoc flame fractal renderers,
i've developed one with flam3/apophysis compatibility.

it aims to be faster and more efficient than flam3/apophysis,
delivering much higher quality images with less noise in less time.

bug reports are appreciated, special thanks to the fine folk in #Aposhack for their help!

BetiBup33 Featured By Owner Dec 7, 2017 Hobbyist Photographer

Hi

I'm big beginner in this Fractals theme and i have one question to help... is it impossible find or make plug in or DLL or something for automatic render "ALL .chaos FILES FROM ONE FOLDER" to .jpg ...
Its very important to me...

Thank You on Yours help

rcurtiss000 Featured By Owner May 31, 2015 Professional Digital Artist

I'm curious any ideas why chaotica locks up everytime i try and save the image, i have an 8 core AMD 4 ghz, 16 megs ram, amd 9700 video card 4 gig, It's driving me crazy

comma-the Featured By Owner Nov 27, 2012

Crashes on open on Mac. I'm running OS X 10.7.5. Would you like the bug report?

TsarveK Featured By Owner Nov 4, 2012

A question:
does chaotica support 3D rendering in the 7X15 version? and the appropriate plugins?

lyc Featured By Owner Nov 5, 2012

hi, unfortunately chaotica doesn't support the apo "3d hack" stuff. it may do in the future to a limited degree, but my plan is to implement 3d fractals differently/properly, using a built-in editing interface.

thanks for checking out chaotica! you should also check out the great #Aposhack chat channel here on deviantart

michaelcanut Featured By Owner May 4, 2012 Student General Artist

Dude, the latest version kicks arse! Awesome stuff! Thank you!!!

lyc Featured By Owner May 4, 2012

thanks a lot mate, this is about the best compliment i can get

much appreciated, hope you make many nice renders with it

Yourmung Featured By Owner Apr 2, 2012 Professional Photographer

Hi and thanks for the render, I've tried to run it from Apo 7X 15 and I have the 0.48 version of Chaotica and always displays the message that is not valid ofr 0.45 version of chaotica.

Mynimi94 Featured By Owner Feb 19, 2012 Student General Artist

Hey

I just realized, that it's not possible to render 3D in Chaotica.
Is there any other way to render an image in 3D other than Chaotica?

lyc Featured By Owner Feb 20, 2012

hallo

you're correct, unfortunately there's no 3d support yet. when it comes, it'll be quite different, and hopefully more interesting than the basic apo3d approach

VerTiGo-Etrex Featured By Owner Jan 16, 2012 Hobbyist Digital Artist

Pretty awesome!

seanwendt Featured By Owner Oct 29, 2011 Hobbyist Digital Artist

I think I remember seeing this issue reported; seems like final xform doesn't get applied in chaotica. is there any way to work around the final xform?

lyc Featured By Owner Oct 29, 2011

final xforms work fine, as long as they don't use 3D or DC plugins.

Xaiyu Featured By Owner Oct 15, 2011

i've been using apophysis to make stuff for kind-of-a-long-time, but I'm still fairly new with it.
what is chaotica? how do you work it, what is it for? I'm not sure I understand, but it seems to help with rendering - and my rendering for some pretty simple flames takes hours!!!
is there an FAQ or somethin round here? I tried searching, but... @ w@/
thanks~

pillemaster Featured By Owner Oct 4, 2011

i just tried it and the results are pretty good, however i have a problem rendering large scale pictures (stripes) eg. 12000x600. is there a trick that i can use to generate poster quality renders from apo, using chaotica?

lyc Featured By Owner Oct 4, 2011

the free version is limited to 1920x1920 resolution, higher being classified as commercial use; the 64bit version allows you to use all your computer's memory when rendering (whereas 32 bit programs are limited to 2 or 3 gigabytes max), and i've made renders as big as

licences are USD $25 for a current-and-next version licence, or $100 for all versions until 1.0; the current version is 0.43, and an editor is being developed for version 0.5: [link]

pillemaster Featured By Owner Oct 4, 2011

thanks for the reply.

i'll take a closer look at the prog and decide about the license. the thing is, i'm not yet used to the prog and i just try to make a poster for my room.

lyc Featured By Owner Oct 4, 2011

i forgot to write the size, 24k by 18k or so...

if you like, i can make a large render for you, just send me a note

pillemaster Featured By Owner Oct 4, 2011

ok cool, maybe later

Epogh Featured By Owner Sep 21, 2011 Professional General Artist

I lyc it a lott.Thank you and bless you.
Bussy with the new one I lyc it thanx
milo

oakandsage Featured By Owner Jun 20, 2011

Hi, I just downloaded Apo7x15 the other day and noticed the Chaotica support so I've been playing with Chaotica. I love the iterative rendering and it's very easy to use. I have been having one problem on Chaotica 0.4 - I don't know if it's a problem with Chaotica, a problem with my computer (32 bit Vista), or a problem with me.

I can't get anything to render using julia or julian (or of course julia3D). No errors in the console window. A trivial flame with the initial transform modified (linear3D = 0, julia = 1) renders a blank screen; a more complex flame with a Julia in it renders the flame as it would look without the transform using julia, with the addition of a horizontal line running from the center of the screen to the right.
I tried copying julia.dll from the Apo7x plugin directory into the Chaotica directory (even though the XML file says it should be natively supported) and that didn't change any of the behavior above.

The trivial flame (blank flame, initial transfer in its default position with variations linear3D = 0 and julia = 1) renders a circle in the Apo7X render window, but Chaotica renders a blank view on at least the first 2 iterations.

Julian2 renders fine (just like the Apo7X render window but of course higher quality). So to some degree, I can get around the problem by just using julian2.

Spamkiller Featured By Owner Jun 17, 2011 Hobbyist Digital Artist

I think you... just saved my life, or something!

lyc Featured By Owner Jun 17, 2011

lolwut?

there's a new version btw [link]

Spamkiller Featured By Owner Jun 26, 2011 Hobbyist Digital Artist

I am in desperate need to render more quickly, because soon I'm gonna have to render at monstrous sizes, that's why.

New version: I came, I saw, I grabbed.

mario837 Featured By Owner Jun 15, 2011

Hi Thomas. Thank you very much for the program. I have used it for some time now with good results and some crashes.
I don't understand the last error message received: "This implementation does not support subelements". The plugin_log.txt lists all plugins as successfully initialised.
Any idea of how can I go around this?
Cheers!
.

piethein21 Featured By Owner Jun 15, 2011 Hobbyist Digital Artist

hey lyc featured this in my journal

see you soon in the chat

BladeTrain3r Featured By Owner Jun 10, 2011

Wouldn't let me upload yesterday >.>

First successful render in Chaotica. Left it to render for about 5 hours, but it had already hit the point of negligible returns around 3 hours in, probably due to all the blur.
[link]

All in all, Chaotica seems to be working excellently.

BladeTrain3r Featured By Owner Jun 9, 2011

Oddly, exporting to chaotica from Apo7x works, but not trying to manually import a saved flame file. Still, it's up and running, and seems to be working well so far

Gonna be leaving a simplish render up through the night, see how it comes out (2 linear triangles, a 3rd triangle with 1 linear3d and 0.125 spiral, a blur variation somewhere in there and a slightly increased filter radius, shouldn't be anything in there to break Chaotica)

Also, Apo seems convinced I'm using a version prior to 0.3 - guess that's an issue with it rather than chaotica, and doesn't seem to have had an effect on the render.

patternmaker Featured By Owner Jun 9, 2011

thanks for the link, I've come accross this through researching chaotica, as I haven't a clue about it?

lyc Featured By Owner Jun 9, 2011

no problem at all, though i don't really know what you're asking (this sentence is not really a question?)

patternmaker Featured By Owner Jun 9, 2011

Sorry about that, thinking aloud I supose? I've been googling chaotica to learn about it and it brought me to you as well as some other info. But at least you have produced a link to the software and that is what I was thanking you for

lyc Featured By Owner Jun 17, 2011

sorry i kinda missed that

there's a new version now, chaotica 0.4, which is much improved: [link]

patternmaker Featured By Owner Jun 18, 2011

Thank you so much for the link!!!

lyc Featured By Owner Jun 18, 2011

BladeTrain3r Featured By Owner Jun 8, 2011

Can't seem to get it to work with Apo7x r15 - I export a flame file but, even after I make sure all variations are supported, it ctd's when I try to open a Flame file. Opening the renders flame file works but I can't render anything.

Same error across two systems - a 1.7GHz centrino running XP and a C2Q running Win7 64

BladeTrain3r Featured By Owner Jun 8, 2011

Awesome! Flam3 has always given me issues and Flam4Cuda just... well yea, still bad with 3Dhack.

Gonna give it a whirl, but I'm thinking it's good already

zweeZwyy Featured By Owner May 25, 2011

Just downloaded the 32 bit version to run on XP & see empty folder "Plugins". Do I load all my plugins into it, or just the ones not on the list in the .xml file?

lyc Featured By Owner May 25, 2011

you're already one step ahead by checking the xml file

yes, that's a good course of action and will make starting up chaotica a little faster compared to having eeeeeverything in there.

for version 0.35 another thing to watch out for is epispiral (which in particular crashes), and 3d and dc plugins probably won't work properly. if you experience crashes with the plugins, a file called plugin_log.txt is created which lists all the plugins that initialised successfully (the one alphabetically after the last successful one should be removed).

the next version, 0.4, features a great many improvements including natively implemented epispiral, safer initialisation of plugins (preventing crashes) and full support for pre_ and post_ variations (other than pre_blur which was previously treated specially). besides that there will be performance improvements and an apophysis-compatible imaging mode which should hopefully reproduce the colours almost exactly (this is the only part left to be done).

finally, thanks for checking out chaotica!

gs13 Featured By Owner Jun 5, 2011

Hello Thomas

Let me know when you relese next version.
Thanks from Brasil.

lyc Featured By Owner Jun 17, 2011

new version is released!

gs13 Featured By Owner Jun 26, 2011

thanks a lot.

MickHogan Featured By Owner May 7, 2011

I am running Chaotica in Linux, with wine, and all is well so far. Thanks for a great tool!

Wi6791lly Featured By Owner Apr 21, 2011

Thanks Lyc

Liuanta Featured By Owner Apr 16, 2011 Hobbyist Digital Artist

Hi again!
I've got a problem again. Chaotica does render some flames perfectly, but absolutely refuses to render others - once I load the flame from Apo 7X.15 and click Render, it shuts down, saying the program stopped working and needs to shut down. What can be the reason for that? Thanks!

lyc Featured By Owner Apr 20, 2011

hi, it's probably because the flame file contains the <flames> tags, besides the normal <flame> ones. either edit out the first and last lines of the .flame file to remove the <flames> and </flames> tags, or simply use the "export to chaotica" option from within apo 7x.15

Lupsiberg Featured By Owner Apr 15, 2011 Hobbyist General Artist

Thank you very much for sharing

seanwendt Featured By Owner Apr 5, 2011 Hobbyist Digital Artist

Cool. One more question - what does Pre-scale do, functionally? I have been trying to find a "sweet spot" of Brightness/Gamma/Prescale settings for my renders.

lyc Featured By Owner Apr 6, 2011

pre-scale and brightness both affect the image brightness, but "brightness" is in exposure stops (EV), i.e. is logarithmic (and can be negative).

the ideal brightness and gamma is strongly dependent on what you're rendering; usually i like to use a gamma of 1.1 to 1.2, sometimes as high as 1.6 and even 2+ in rare circumstances where you want to get a very "punchy" image. as you increase the gamma you usually need to increase the brightness, however as the render goes on you need to turn the brightness down... until it converges

seanwendt Featured By Owner Mar 29, 2011 Hobbyist Digital Artist

Thanks for your work on this. I have been using it for 2 hours and enjoying it.

One question I have is about the process priority. With Apophysis/flam3, the way I would achieve a usable system while rendering is utilizing processor affinity (Task Manager > right-click chaotica.exe > Set Affinity... > UN-check CPU0 (or any core on a multi-core system) | this allows that core to be freed for all the other processes running, and this system seemed to work quite well for keeping everything happy and still having a pretty good render rate ( I have 8 cores so using 7 out of 8 isn't much of a reduction).

Question is, I know chaotica.exe sets the process priority to Low. Is this a better method for system usability? I am not sure how process priority is handled exactly. I am using Windows 7, w/ a Core i7 930.

Thanks!

lyc Featured By Owner Mar 30, 2011

i don't suggest to disable certain logical processors for rendering; i think chaotica asks for IDLE priorit, i.e. it will absorb only spare cycles, so there should be no problem with system performance unless you run out of memory (in which case it'll grind to a halt).