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Apophysis is a free Windows program that you can use to create fractal flames.

I haven’t been using for a long time yet and haven’t done a lot designs yet either since I mostly focus on my 3D art but I like to play around with it now and then and create cool looking designs, which I want to show off in this lens. Ok, they’re still really basic but you have to admit that they do look pretty cool.

I like it a lot and maybe it’s something for you to play around with too.

Apophysis in a nutshell.

Apophysis is a free fractal flame program for Windows.

Fractal Flames (algorithmically generated images and animations) were originally developed in 1992 by Scott Draves. Mark Townsend changed it by translating it into Delphi (another computer language) and he added a graphical user interface to it so it would be easier to use.
Since the it’s been improved by Peter Sdobnov, Piotr Borys and Ronald Hordijk and it’s currently even in 3D.

The fun thing about Apophysis is that you can play with it for hours.
Just by hitting various options and adding and adjusting the triangles that decide the look of the flame, you can come up with unlimited possibilities.

A basic tutorial to help you get started.

I only really know the basics but that should be enough to help you get started.

When you start up the program you should see something similar like this.

The buttons that I marked are the ones I mainly use.

The yellow button on the top left is the Render button that you use to create the actual picture.
When you click on it you get the following window :

You can see that it has various settings like size and quality and even a auto-shutdown.

Below the Render button is a list of various basic flames. When you click on them you’ll get totally different flames that only have the color combinations in common.
I normally just go by those to select a flame that looks promising to work with.

To the left you see that I highlighted 5 buttons.
The first one is the Editor.
When you click on it you will get the following screen :

The triangles that you see are what make up the design of the flame.
When you stretch those or move them around, you can slightly alter the flame. You can also add more triangles, duplicate them or remove them using the buttons I highlighted.
To the right of the triangles there are more settings that you can use to alter the flame.
I added a triangle to improve my flame.

The second button that I highlighted is the Adjust button.

This lets you adjust :
- the Camera position and rotation,

- the Rendering Gamma, Brightness, Vibrancy and Background color,

- the Gradient (which is the color combination) and

- the Image size.

The third button is a shortcut to the Gradient option.
By moving the Rotate option and selecting a different Preset you can change the colors of your flame.
I really like blue so I changed it to a blue combination.

The fourth button is called Mutation.

By clicking on the various options you can drastically change your flame.

The fifth button is a shortcut to Image Size.

Just by adding a triangle and changing the color I already like the result.

And after rendering it I get the following result :

It’s really simple but then I barely touched anything.

How I got into Apophysis.

In January 2009 I was checking out others people art on DevianArt when I came across this picture by hmn :

I was instantly blown away by it’s beauty so after reading the description I just had to give the program a try myself and you can see the results in my Art Portfolio.

Similar programs

Apophysis isn’t the only flame editor program so these are some links to some of the most familiar similar programs.

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