quadrium | prime walkthrough
In the quadrium family of products, the most common way to create an image is to start with one of the various starting point images (which include both presets as well as user favorites). For this walkthrough, we'll start with this image:
This uses a simple julia set with a "satin" colorer (which, being a simple indexed coloring algorithm, defaults to being grayscale). We're going to do four things - we'll change the julia seed value (to get more "spirals"), zoom in on one of the areas, increase the number of iterations, and change to a different gradient:
There is, unfortunately, a limit on how much detail one can put on a fractal image using a single coloring algorithm (especially in the case where the colorer produces some index in a gradient - you're limited to just the colors that the gradient has). So we're going to extend this by using a layered meta colorer (one can also create a completely independent layer, but we want to use the same fractal, just with a different interpretation). We select the existing colorer box, copy it, change it to the layered meta colorer, and past that (old) value in as the "base colorer":
(Copy and past works not just with specific numbers, but entire objects - one can also use drag and drop to move settings between documents).
We now want to overlay that colorer with another one - we'll use a similar "striped" colorer. We do this by clicking the "+" button to create a new overlay, set that layer to "Adjust" and change the color that it used to "Striped":
There are a variety of different overlay types, such as texturizing, adjusting some component, or several different version of compositing with or without masks.
We want to adjust the "lightness" of the image using the result of the striped colorer to control that. So we change the adjuster to "Lightness" and make some tweaks and changes to that object as well as the striped colorer that provides the values for the adjuster:
Notice how now instead of just blues and reds, we've got various extra adjustments on those hues, making them lighter or darker. This gives us more texture than would be possible with a single (indexed based) colorer.
We're next going to use some "traps" to add another (composed) layer. So we add another overlay, set it to "Composite", and use one of the trap colorers:
We picked "Last Trap" and we're using a "Waves X" trap (which makes it all kind of wiggly). We've also changed a couple of other parameters, most notably the trap threshold was lowered (which effectively make the traps smaller - with a larger value, they completely overwhelmed the image).
But we want some variation on this - if we could move the trap shapes a bit, they might line up differently, producing an interesting result. We can change the trap shape instead to be a "Transformed Distance", using an affine translate with the same "Waves X" distance:
Note that we could use any transformation - including weird things like tiling or "reflected water ripples" (which might look nice on an entire image, on something like this, well, let's just say that the results are "interesting" to say the least). Notice that we've also changed the graident to something other than black to white...
We can change this up a bit more - suppose we want a little texture on these tentacle like things. That's pretty simple - a trap is composed of several components, including a basic function to measure the distance (which we've played with) as well as several parts to control the shading and translucency. Up until now, we've used the default object that creates shading and translucency from a distance function. We'll just pick a different "adapter" and we can change that as well.
This is one that includes a texture, something that combines the texture with the underlying shade, and things that allow us to specify the shape of the shading as well as the alpha. We pick the right values to add just a little noise to shapes - now they are starting to look like something.
It might be more nice if each layer were a slightly different shade, to make them stand out more. Easy enough to do - we copy what we've got for the current shape (the transformed distance of waves x, etc...) and then change that to "Alternating Trap Colors" and paste our old value in for "Base Shape". We now will have every third one be a different shade (since we set "Number of Colors" to 3). We also edit the gradient to be composed of three parts, so each one gets a slightly different color:
And we can finish our unnatural image by changing the image aspect ratio, zoom out a bit and rotate, to get just the right composition...
Of course, we can play quite a bit from here. For example, if we remove the texture and go with a trap that we can just set the shading and translucency, and then use the "Blend Traps" (instead of "Last Trap") we can blur and blend together traps. We can then pick a more sophisticated compositing object, this one allowing for a combination of how what parts are composited (in this case "Dest In") as well as how they are composed ("Multiply"). This results in something with softer edges and smoother blending (yes, this is from a slightly different location in the image as well):
Obviously these examples are quite arbitrary and more than a little garish, but this is just some simple experiments to give a slight feel for some of the capabilities of quadrium | prime. Normally, there is a great deal more time spent refining color palettes and in composition, but that is far less interesting to walk through...