Festive time of the year, and there’s baubles flying everywhere. So I saw where the strings and caps were added via photoshop to great effect. I thought I’d try doing it just in JWildfire. It’s far from perfect, and will require some tweaking but the result can be rewarding. So apologies if this is a bit of a cobbled together tutorial. Time is not on my side.

Time Needed : 45 minutes

Decorate your fractal baubles with a string and cap.

First of all, grab the bauble scripts
Download them from here
Then download the caps and strings flame pack
Grab the flame pack here
Now load the flame pack into JWildfire
Once you’ve loaded the flame pack, check the left side for the flames. You’ll see some have the bauble on them already. These are for reference, but others just the string and the cap. What we’re going to do is use layers. So we’ll run the script to generate a bauble, then append the string and cap. Always remember to click layer append mode off again ! (so easy to leave this on).
Appending to the bauble
So to reiterate, run a script to get a bauble you like, then switch to the layers tab. Click “Layer append mode” then find a flame on the left with string and a cap and double click it. Then click “layer append mode” off again. You should now have a bauble, a cap and some string. The string might be too long, or the cap might be off centre but we’ll get to that. Or if it looks like it’s rotated round, make sure your rotation is set to 270 on the Camera tab.
Adjusting the string and cap settings.
You might find that you have two lots of string, just click on one of the layers with string and delete. That’s that taken care of, now the complicated business of adjusting the cap and string itself. See the diagram for explanations, but the gist of it is. The parplot is the cap. Make sure you are on the Linear3D variation, click it to highlight it. (I’ve highlighted parplot sorry). Then click the affine tab, alter the adjustment value to 0.01 and use the arrows to move the cap about. Left and right are up and down, and vice versa the up and down arrows move it left and right. Weird I know. This should get the cap to the position you want it on the bauble and in the middle of the string.
Adjusting the string
You might see that the string is visible through the cap, so we can adjust the length by altering the width value. I didn’t do this on purpose to confuse! Just make sure you are on the layers tab, then click the striing layer, open it up and adjust the post crop box width value. No prizes for guessing that increasing the value shortens the string! You can of course change the gradient of the string and the cap separate to the bauble. So have fun with that.
Cap settings (advanced)
If you’re brave (crazy) enough to play with the caps themselves, you can change the parplot preset ID. Be warned though, most will look so big and strange. Size can be controlled by the weight of the parplot variation. So leave preset alone unless you’re drunk maybe. Feel free to change the other settings, but the most useful ones are really just the colour mode. Controls how the colours are applied to the cap. The cap is half a pasta shell (I kid you not). Umax with a value of 3 will show the other half.
Nice bauble with a nice cap and string.
So, hopefully you will have a nice bauble with string and a cap on now. It’s clumsy I know, but it works, and a lot of fun can be had messing around with this. Happy Baubling !!