Incendia: The Program and it's Creator

Hmmm! THAT’S what I was trying to think of. A flippin’ 60’s lava lamp. I’ll add that to the title ASAP. Thanks!

Yeah, lamp is the obvious choice for inspiration but it was named for a shell by the programmer and the more I looked at it the more I thought of a wood screw. If I had stepped back a ways from the screen, I’d have seen the lamp aspect soon or later.

The colour choices were created using 2 presets of 3D spheres. Each sphere has a singular property, such as a bright orange ring and a dark green fade to the center. That set of unique properties is applied to some aspect of the fractal. I’d I had used it, it might be applied to the horns as a bright orange tip with a dark green shade fading to pale green at the base of the horn. But when using two spheres, you can fine tune where you want things to change colour and with what depth. Then you can tweak other settings and change the spectrum for any or all the colours. Additionally, you can add an external (background) fog with or without a bright sun spot, horizon, colour. Those options present a near infinite set of possible colour changes but you can actually make it infinite: you can use any image you’d like to be the colour or texture palette of your choosing. There’s a shot of me in one of these so I’ve been eaten by one of my own creations. LOL!

I looked a bit too and saw nothing but there’s a badly dated forum you might try and see if anyone is still on board or all abandoned ship.

Glad you like the image! Interesting you’d like this program for a Mac. While it’s said to be the better creative platform by far (and I m forced to agree from no more than an hour here and there playing with one), Mac users want access to the extremely limited high end programs for PC. Honestly, I can’t even imagine ever exhausting the artistic potential from the box with a Mac. If you guys start exploring PC programs you’re gonna wind up like America: accidentally but publicity blowing up people to explore dirty rocks on the moon and ignoring all but the tiniest sliver of the ocean we live next to. “Show me yours and I’ll show you mine!” LOL!

Thank you very much, Vanessa! It sure has an unusual set of lines and curves. Until the lamp was mentioned, I was thinking something organic but dead, sorta like the inside colours of an abalone on the outside of a cone shell with a very protective attitude. LOL!

Thank you and it does have a grace hinting at deep sensuality. If I get the second desktop running again and that could happen soon, I will do the rendering thing to its completion on that machine. But have you seen or read about AniMusic? To create some of the most phenomenal computer graphics imaginable, they have their work at rendering farms – scores of mega computers all working on a single task – for years. I doubt I saved the entire scheme for this fractal as it was so soon in the game for me that I didn’t bother saving things that were 98% presets. But I can probably look at this partially finished one and recreate it more or less the same. Just remember, I may NEVER have the finished render for a dozen or more reasons, not the least being a slight power interruption that my APC power protection program will catch but need to inform me. That graphics interruption might stop the render and it may not be able to fully recover. And if there’s a total power failure, APC is supposed to allow me to shut down programs carefully and safely shut down Windows before I run out of battery power. But that only works if I’m home and watching the outage happen, not asleep or at work where most of the free rendering time is. Also the key term is ‘shut down’. Maybe if I hook my laptop to APC I can get them to work together to hibernate the computer instead of shutting it down completely. But even a safe shut down is fatal for a fractal being rendered. Integrated battery back-up at my price level saves hardware and unsaved data; it won’t know how to save a fractal parameter in the process of being rendered. Even if I’m right there are doing it manually, there’s no assurance it will restart the render from where it stopped. Of course I can always start it over from scratch and THAT parameter is always saved before I start rendering but it might restart that 12-month rendering time each winter for the rest of our lives. LOL!

Honey and nutmeg is fine but I’m allergic to chocolate. As a baby I couldn’t even suck my thumb. But for one big, well-cooked artichoke a day, I’d probably go out with you when you take you dog for a walk and do the “blue bagging” for you twice a day. LOL!

Thanks from both of us, the program and me! LOL! The author of the program put the pieces together from multiple fractal generators and layered them to render together. I just tweaked the preset a bit to make it “mine”. A 10-year old can do this with this program and get these or better results. :-D

I don’t know what either of those are but I’ll gladly use them if they are needed. What I can’t seem to do is get Linux to work anywhere. LOL!

Your geeky son thinks what you’re doing is the problem. Your geeky friend here says that losing your work is the least to worry about. LOL! Between power spikes and drops, you can lose your COMPUTER. And even if you back-up outside it, you don’t want to just buy a new one, do you? If so, send your current one to me, get that new one, and make sure your Fairy Godmother gets you a really nice replacement that you can also send to me when an electrical storm fries it. I can always use the parts that don’t reek to badly of toasted wiring. LOLOLOL!

I can eat ginger cake, ginger bread, ginger in its raw form, ginger sweetened, ginger snaps, ginger ale, and that stuff that stops you from coughing after a big wad of wasabi. But chocolate is the enemy I can’t live with or without so I eat it and suffer when I have to. I stopped sucking my thumb but it wasn’t all that chocolately even when I was sweet and innocent.

I used to walk my snow white fake-Persian on a leash. She learned it from being walked beside traffic on the sidewalk of a busy road: she stayed right at my heel at a very young age. Soon afterwards, I could take her to the huge parks and walk her without a leash until dumbasses started breaking the law with dogs off leashes. She loved the geese and they weren’t too concerned about her.

I’ll get a dedicated rendering computer sooner or later but on a fractal site I visit, one guy talked about the TWELVE HOURS of rendering he let his computer do to finish just one fractal! I’m not sure I’ll ever be THAT patient. LOL!

Thank you very much but this one is one the program did by default – not something I created by working hard at it. LOL! Grab up the program ASAP! The creator is out of money and the site where it is may suddenly disappear at any time. Also, there’s an update of the program used to create this piece so the results are even more spectacular and easily obtainable. You will love me and yourself afterwards. :-D

Damn. My complete response to this was lost, probably when I went offline at work. Arrgh! Anyway, I figured out the background fog issue somewhere during the subsequent 10 fractals I did tho I can’t remember when. LOL! What fooled me is that I’m colourblind and didn’t see that the three sliders for colour were shifting anything relevant. Once I started turning things off their default settings, I saw what was happening eventually. But being that it was a default setting and one I wasn’t aware of, it got past me rather easily in the beginning. :-D

Incidentally, how do you like the new version’s interface? It’s still causing me issues since I don’t understand the creation process all that well but I still love the program.

I’ve tried both saving the buffers and pausing (stopping) the render mid-process but both have failed at times with distressing results, often the complete crash of the program and loss of everything. I started saving the partial renders but it seems that the more you mess with the program while it’s rendering, the more grief you’re gonna invite. I’ve pretty much adjusted to a single old computer doing the entire render while I just go about business on another one. The old one is slow and shows less of the early rendering process but it does get the job done, if days later. LOL! If I could have ANY computer of mine finish a Incendia render while I was sleeping a single night, I’d have a hard time going to work in the mornings! As sit is, I might have a hard time keeping the oven door shut even if I don’t need the oven. LMAO!

Thanks Martilena! I haven’t looked at your work yet but I will. :-) But it waaaaaaaayyyy too late on the Incendia warning. I am already an Incendijunkie. LOL!

Awesome! Thank you coppertrees and the rest of the group! :-D

Thank you very much and it sucks that artists like this one have to scrape together coins from donors to do what they do for all of us. Mozart was like this near the end of his life but look at what he left behind, underappreciated in his lifetime! Aexion, Incendia’s creator, is a 39-year old Panamanian who lives roughly halfway between Santiago and the canal zone.

Thank you very much! I’m not as comfortable with lighter designs in 3D fractals, preferring boldness. But this came out of Incendia almost untouched so I tried to stay true to the design while taking some of the bite out of all the sharp parts by making them sweeter. LOL!

Thanks and you will be having fun in a day or so, so be prepared for some challenging programming. If you’re like me and a fractal/math dummy, this program will give you wings eventually!!!

Ugh. Well you just hit me in the right spot: dead centre in the heart. If there’s another way to transmit money other than PayPal, I’ll do it as soon as I have those details. I’m now one of those artists you speak of and while I gave the program and creator monster credit, I did it where I was trying to make a buck from using it. I haven’t made a dime from them yet but, ya know, I think I could easily at local street faires or even garage sales. Priced right, the program’s results speak for themselves.

OK, PEEPS! What’s the other way to send monetary credit thru the Internet without using a credit card or PayPal???

DDD, no harm done. :-) You helped re-awaken me because I tried to donate, failed, and forgot all about the need. I agree with the $5 per user being sent but I’d also have paid $5 for the program – even in beta if I’d had a trial version. And I actually believe it may be time for that $5 to come up front. Since there are a ton of us who are already users promoting it, the buzz isn’t gonna stop any time soon. If the downloads fund the future, the next hurdle will be handled before it happens.

As as for now, Incendia users need to step up and show their appreciation. If people tried and PayPal was the roadblock, we’ve got to find another route. If we can’t find another money handler, Aexion will have to make a ‘for purchase’ download, perhaps the one he’s offering with high resolution, and we users need to make a purchase. Nothing will change except what needs to: the download is the same and the cash for the download cuts out that asinine step of dealing with PayPal directly.

DDD, I think you hit on the solution so please contact our genius again and convince him to set up the pay system. Then it’s up you peeps like you and me to promote the hell out of the program to newbies and tell past users there’s a situation that might stop all future development and keep Incendia in beta until the website fees are simply stopped.

Deal? Deal! :-D I’ll try thru the FanSite. The site’s a nightmare cuz it’s in beta and buggy but I can get in and reach him thru the friends link in there.

“Your mission, should you decide to accept, is to…” :-D

I thank you, Mandy!

Well, isn’t THAT interesting! So when people are talking about it “finishing”, it just got pulled out of the oven when they thought it was finished baking?? LOL! And yes, I came from 2D renders and NONE took very long but ALL of them told you when they were finished.

Hmmm. Since I used the baking analogy, I continue by saying I should have saved the recipe. But like MacArthur Park, “I’ll never have that recipe again, oh no!!!!!” That was a beginner’s mistake and I’ll start saving the formulas BEFORE I start renders in the future, both for safety’s sake and documentation. However, I do have the computer documentation and it’s not a lot better than you described, tho you AppleEaters are sooooo prejudiced about PC’s. LOL!

Windows XP Home, version 2002, Service pack 2 in a Compaq Presario S6500NX, using AMD Athlon XP3000+ 2.16GHz and 2GB of RAM. Everything I could manually turn off I turned off so there was as close to 100% processing power for Incendia as I could muster.

I too have had renders go ‘backwards’ on me but with Apophysis 1.0. I’ve upgraded to V 2.02 but haven’t worked with it because of the love affair with Incendia. It’s good to know it was probably because of something I did and not the program but I am so unlearned at this I’d never know what switches meant what. And that’s odd because I can handle a digital synthesizer with 200 knobs and sliders on the fly easily, even onstage. But seeing the workings of a fractal program is all but impossible for me. I couldn’t even tell you what was a program switch and what was an editing option in the formula. :-O You actually let the thing run backwards while awaiting a reply from a author online? Better yet, you got it stopped and was able to change the switch without either glitching the program or ruining your fractal?

Bro, you are light years ahead of me. LMAO! But thanks and I’m glad you liked the fractal!

LMFAO!!!!! There’s no substitute for a Mac. Period. I am a diehard PC guy only because I started with something I could afford: “the works” from Gateway for under $500 and a blazing 10GB hard drive. If I could have gotten ANYTHING from Apple even at year 2000 prices, I’d have done it after comparing the two. But if you’re an artist, you use a Mac or you fight a PC. (sigh)

I need to get Vista taken off the principle fractal rendering machine, this Toshiba Satellite laptop. The machine is awesome; the OS is the worst piece of garbage anyone has ever been forced to buy. I’m going to make my demands of Toshiba since they’ll want to keep a customer and maybe get them to downgrade me to XP or upgrade me to Win7 for free. Odds are I’m just going to eat less than 2 years of Vista with more than 20 years worth of problems.

If I knew what I was getting for a long, long render, I could make a decision about doing it. But to have no knowledge of fractals or math makes every bake a surprise. I’ve sure put something I knew was yummy in the oven (taking a peak at the drawing before committing to the render) and pulled someone else’s dirty socks out after using hours of MY resources. Coming back from a vacation on Neptune to find THAT isn’t gonna be appetizing regardless how many pounds of custard it takes to bury it.

Got a used Mac for a starving artist? Or are Apples ever actually considered “used”? LOL!

All my worst fears confirmed. LOL! However, I’m a strong believer in product research so I rarely pay for anything I absolutely need for my computers to be safe and run correctly. I run a pile of free protection apps and haven’t had anything get thru to mess with me in many years. There are scores of unhappy PC users who can guide me to the best freebies. LOL! Of course, this slows down routine functions but I can also turn off anything/everything for renders or processor-intensive work offline.

I switched to Open Office but have had problems with compatibility. It’s not as seamless as it claims and can be a disaster when a doc is saved in it and nothing else will open it. But I’ve sworn off paying Microsoft a dime I don’t have to.

Ah, we have more common history: PC’s. :) I’ll get wise and get out as soon as I win the lottery. People are getting laid off at work right and left so spending extra for the colour of the box or even quality computing isn’t showing up on my horizons any time soon. :(

Thank you very much and I hope so as well. :-)