Start from Scratch – Creating a New Flame

Time Needed : 10 minutes

A flame in JWildfire is the set of variations and transforms you've used to create your design.
We're going to go through some steps here to make a very simple fractal.

  1. New From Scratch

    After running JWildfire you need to click New From Scratch to begin our fractal (your screen might be differently coloured to this).

    1 New from scratch

  2. Add A Transform

    Without getting technical, a transform is the first instruction, it will contain one or more variations. A variation is what alters the method of creating the fractal. By default when you click on Add it will put a Linear3D variation, so let’s do that.

    2 New Transform Button

  3. On screen

    You’ll see on your screen, a bunch of dots, and a triangle. The triangle is our control for the variation we just added. Don’t worry about that just now, let’s just add another transform so we can start to play.

    New Transform Screen

  4. Add Another Transform

    Click Add again, and it will place another transform in there, again, by default it will be a Linear3D variation.

    New Transform Button

  5. Moving the triangles (affines)

    Click and hold your mouse button on a triangle and move it about the screen.

    Mouse Buttons Button

  6. Controlling the triangles

    The triangle’s position, size, shape and rotation can all be controlled, here are the buttons that do that. Click one then move the mouse, or in the case of the triangle shape, click a point on the triangle and move it about.

    Triangle Control Buttons

  7. Changing the Variation

    This is where you’ll see the differences. So far we have two Linear3D variations on our transforms, let’s change the second one.

    Click the NonLinear tab, then click the dropdown after Linear 3D, this will give you a list of variations to choose from. We’ll choose Hypertile1.

    Choose Variation

  8. A sort of interesting design, once you’ve done that you’ll get something like this.

    Play with the controls, and try different variations. Don’t worry if some of them don’t give you anything, you’ll probably need to add another transform again so you have three. Try changing the variations on each transform.

    If your fractals look small…

    Interesting Design

  9. Adjust the Zoom/Pixs per unit

    See pic.

    Adjust Zoom

Tools
  • JWildfire

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