Apophysis and flam3

[Apo-llo]

Can anyone explain what flam3 does?
You can talk to me as though I am a simpleton, I won't mind. ☺

[cnicita]

Greetings!
I just joined the board
Are you talking about the flam3 renderer? Then it will be what renders the flame formula you create, I believe. Apophysis has an internal renderer to give you what you see on the screen, but you can get better quality with some of the more advanced flam3 exes.

Correct me if I'm wrong, all.

Carolyn

[amanita]

Flam3 is the name of the original flame fractal codebase made by Scott "Spot" Draves and is the godfather of all flame fractal apps existing today, including Apophysis. The Flam3 pack contains: flam3-render, flam3-animate and flam3-genome programs. It can render still images (like apo), and animations used by the Electric Sheep screensaver app. Back around the early childhood of Apophysis an early version of the Flam3 (version 1.x?) fractal code was glued together with a graphical interface and early Apophysis was born.

Actually Flam3 is still under development by Erick Reckase today (2011). I have to mention that Flam3 version 3.0 was released this year and you can easily install it on linux/mac/win and even on freebsd and other exotic os-es.

Similarities and differences:
- the triangles that you grab around in apophysis are called coefficients in Flam3,
- a transform in Apophysis is called xform in Flam3
- every flame contain typically 1-10 xform/transform
- every xform/transform contain some variations like: linear, swirl, horseshoe, etc.
- a flame file is an XML file and it contains various general fields, like: brightness, gamma, zoom, quality, size, etc, and it contains xforms as well.
- apophysis has a nice gui, Flam3 package is a command-line only utilitarian app.

Apophysis and Flam3 are nearly the same internally, and a flame file exported from apophysis will produce an XML file that will render nicely using flam3-render. However Flam3 has many-many-many more variations for you to tweak and apophysis cannot render those extra ones. What do I mean?

Here is a list of variations in Flam3 v3.x (2011). Inspect the first dozen variations they are present in apo's built in list however the last 3-4 dozen variations are present in Flam3 only:
Linear
Sinusoidal
Spherical
Swirl
Horseshoe
Polar
Handkerchief
Heart
Disc
Spiral
Hyperbolic
Diamond
Ex
Julia
Bent
Waves
Fisheye
Popcorn
Exponential
Power
Cosine
Rings
Fan
Blob
Pdj
Fan2
Rings2
Eyefish
Bubble
Cylinder
Perspective
Noise
Julian
Juliascope
Blur
Gaussian blur
Radial blur
Pie
Ngon
Curl
Rectangles
Arch
Tangent
Square
Rays
Blade
Secant2
Twintrian
Cross
Disc2
Super Shape
Flower
Conic
Parabola
Bent2
Bipolar
Boarders
Butterfly
Cell
Cpow
Curve
Edisc
Elliptic
Escher
Foci
Lazysusan
Loonie
Pre_Blur
Modulus
Oscilloscope
Polar2
Popcorn2
Scry
Separation
Split
Splits
Stripes
Wedge
Wedge julia
Wedge sph
Whorl
Waves2
Exp
Log
Sin
Cos
Tan
Sec
Csc
Cot
Sinh
Cosh
Tanh
Sech
Csch
Coth
Auger
Flux

Flam3 has other exotic features like density estimation, various dithering methods, color handling methods etc.

After all Flam3 is more advanced in terms of giving those cool VARIATIONS mentioned above, but it lacks an easy to use gui, while apophysis lack already existing flam3 features but you can make nice flames using your mouse only.

What would be the ideal IMHO?: Implement those cool-fresh-and-new Flam3 v3.x variations in Apophysis, otherwise leave apo as it is.