I did track down my zoom/scaling issue that I was mentioning in the previous post, and I improved the distance map for my bitmap orbit coloring. I’m still not 100% happy with it – I need to think a bit more about what I want to do there exactly, but it’s still enough that I spent a couple of hours yesterday playing with Marzipan as a “fractal generating software” and having fun with it, and not only as a “software project I’m working on”. Granted, the “UI” is still mostly “let me change the color palette and recompile”, but I was having too much fun making pretty images to dig into making the UI usable 🙂

So – here are a few pictures from my last “creative” session 🙂

For “Purple explosion,” the seed bitmap is a bunch of rectangles of the same size put randomly on the canvas.

“Rainbow equation” is dedicated to Matthias, who was the one mentioning I should put the set equation in the image. And it’s rainbow because why the hell not 🙂

“Lace flowers” uses one of the brushes from GIMP (Manju’s Flower – Large) as its base. I quite like this one, except for the fact that my processing of the flower should be smoother so that the end result is also smoother. That’s how I learn 😉

For “Tux funnel”, I used as a base the Tux Mono drawing by gg3po, Iwan Gabovitch, GPL licensed, via Wikimedia Commons.

One of the things that amuses me is the ephemeral quality of what I do here. Choosing to save a picture (and that’s still somewhat of an ordeal) is the only way to keep a trace of what I’m doing. I cannot get back to an image and try to “keep it, but improve it”: since I don’t have my settings and I don’t remember where I zoom, any new attempt will be a new image. I even didn’t keep my seed bitmaps so far – so reproducing an image would really be hopeless. And I quite like it that way.