Wishing for mutation window

[Andrew Ostrovsky]

Mutation window similar to one in Apophysis would be nice.

I do not want to take any unnecessary space on your bug list to ask for additional features since most of them would bee too time consuming to implement and may not be realistic. Yet, it may be something that you find interesting.

1. Flow-charting work-flow interface (see example at to http://www.aviary.com/tools/filter-editor) with abilities to save, edit and share frequently used flowcharts. In a certain way flow-charting would provide a breed between a flame and a script and may create visual mutation trees for flame exploration. So in addition to simple blending between frames it could introduce complex branching while staying more visual than mathematical - the strongest attraction of flame-generators.

2. Layer support with blending modes and masking. Ultra Fractal went this way and gathered quite a following. Some mutations almost beg for layering - first you create trunk (one layer) and with a little tweak you create leaves and with another little tweak you create fruit. Self-masking with existing coloring can also go a very long way. Think of the whole thing as exponentially expanding volume of permutations, where each flame-layer adds another dimension.

3. Image import. Ability to import even small images could make fr0st into crazy graphic design tool - think of aligning letters, numbers, symbols along all these loops, warps, bubbles, perspective lines and such. Additional ability to spread color values from existing images along all those crazy variation lines would give any painter an instant infatuation. With some creative pixel interpolation algorithm it can become some sort of multidimensional displace filter.

4. Vector export. As far as I know there is nothing like this on the market. Every fractal generator is a raster program. It is probably related to chaos game generation of values more suitable for raster output while vector requires very precise and continuous values. Yet there must be some sort of solution of how to translate one into another. Lack of knowledge on my part does not allow me intelligently speculate about the solution. But the fact alone that flame images have certain boundaries and density distributions suggest that any given flame can be idealized into mesh.

5. Light table. That is comparatively small request. Most photographers want the ability to see the results of whole photo-shoot at once and ability to easily sort, rate and delete the frames. The existing serial list with small preview is simply not sufficient for fast flame processing. I want to be able to quickly evaluate, delete, arrange and save my batches without rendering first, viewing the results and then sorting the flame catch.

Anyway don't take the above seriously, I perfectly realize that most of the above requests are too wild to even consider. Just can't help dreaming.

Thank you for the wonderful program, anyway.

[Vitor Bosshard (algorias)]

There are some good ideas here... I will definitely take a look at this list when planning new features.