Manual ChaoticaIntegration
About Chaotica
Chaotica is a really nice piece of software, which was designed to create and render flame-fractals in the best quality possible, developed by Glare Technologies. It creates brilliant images with rich colors and sharp details in little time, and also supports fractal-animations, with very nice motion-blur-effects.
In the current state, it clearly focuses on the rendering and has a rather minimal interface to design and manage flames. But, this makes it a perfect candidate for an integration into other programs. Additionally, it uses only a very decent amount of memory, launches very quickly and (per default) occupies not much of the screen, so that the integration really feels smooth.
Feature differences
But, nothing comes without a cost. So, we can't just export all of our flames to Chaotica and become happy by having rendered them in better quality in less time. Both programs, JWildfire and Chaotica, are very different, and transfering flame-parameters between them is actually a very challenging task. But, many of those differences are not a fault, or something similar, which may be eventually "solved", many differences are influenced by design, and they will remain.
Some examples:
- Chaotica currently does not support any (Pseudo)3D-feature, so all the 3D-stuff in JWildfire will not translate. Or in simple words: Fractals in Chaotica are always 2D
- JWildfire does not support the loading of any external Apophysis-plugins (and has all plugins integrated), where Chaotica supports both, internal and external plugins.
This may lead to different behaviour in certain cases, because there is no garuantee that a certain plugin with the name X will behave in all programs the same. Apo-Plugins were often created in Delphi or C, while JWildfire-plugins are written in Java, and Chaotica probably uses some C-dialect.
- In animations, Chaotica is designed to work on a time-basis, while JWildfire works one a frame-basis (which can be translated in each other, of course).
- While Chaotica can have any variation as "post_" or "pre_"-variation, JWildfire still uses the Apophysis-approach to decide the priority by name (because of compatiblity reasons)
- Chaotica and JWildfire use different models for applying affine transforms
- Anti-Aliasing works different in both program
