On the right, are the environmental controls I have not made any alterations to those default settings in my current explorations of Oxidizer.On the left, a column for displaying open flames along with buttons at the bottom for adding, editing, or deleting selected flames from the list.Create and cross-breed up to sixteen fractal flames. Powerful tool for cross-breeding and mutating flam3 files. Open an existing flam3 file save a flam3 file. Launch Oxidizer and have a quick look at the toolbar and other items in the primary window. If you’d like to learn about the math concepts behind flam3 files be sure to check out the documentation links at. Patience Grasshopper let Oxidizer run in the background while you mess around in Photoshop. Depending on image size, complexity and quality settings a fractal flame can take several hours or several days to completely write. Once I started saving, crashes have been almost non-existent.Īnother thing one needs to be prepared for is lengthy render times. Don’t skip saving the flam3 file - two solid days of program crashes taught me that lesson very well. So, save as flam3, then save (render) the flame to one of the available image formats. Just as critical, and even more so, is saving the native flame file before the image is rendered the extension is. But that’s putting the horse ahead of the cart. The end result is a beautifully rendered fractal flame saved as a Photoshop file. The most important piece of information you need to know up front is Oxidizer requires a two part file save process flame and image.
This article does not document the full range of Oxidizer’s capabilities it does however, give one a good point from which to start exploring. The primary idea for this tutorial is to pass on what I’ve learned, which admittedly, just covers some basic procedures. Now, several weeks later, and with a good number of nice flames rendered, the time is right for a follow up report.
With that in mind we’re keeping the article online for historical purposes please take a detour over to our Introduction to Oxidizer tutorial over in the wiki - you’ll find up to date info on using Oxidizer in it’s present state.īack in mid February of 2007 I took a brief look at Oxidizer as a Quick Review to share my excitement for what appeared to be a relatively unknown native Mac OS X application for rendering fractal flames. While this article is helpful it was written with an ancient release of Oxidizer and things have changed dramatically over time.