The Journey

I never had much interest in creating Julias until I read Carl’s tutorial. I tried the various techniques described, but I had difficulty making anything spectacular. When I first saw Majestic Julia by Zueuk, though, I knew that I wanted to make this style of Julia. I saved the render and would sit at the computer just staring at it, trying to figure out how it was done. Not only was the render bright and clearly detailed, but also I didn’t understand how to form the “side bars”. More frustration came when I discovered that other Apophysis users managed to figure out the technique.

I worked on Julia basics following Carl’s tutorial to the letter, though few of those renders met with any success on deviantART. For whatever reason, I kept working on Julias in addition to reworking my Apophysis Guide. One break came when I read Zueuk’s tutorial on bubbles described at FracFan Forums (see the Resource section). At one point, he mentions setting a variable to a negative value. In a moment of clarity, I built a Julia by Carl’s method and set the last triangle to the largest Julian variation variable of the group (at that point set randomly to Julian 2). Then, I set the julian_power to 2 and the julian_dist value to -1. Voila. I now had a Julia with side bars.

However, it wasn’t a Grand Julian. There were “ghost” images all over the place and the main area still lacked detail. I commonly used up to 9 triangles to compensate. I would build new Julias over and over again without success. Along the way, I did discover the goodness of rotating triangles, which will be discussed later. Carl had mentioned this in his tutorial, but I hadn’t really understood the purpose at the time. The Julia would generally look good, but as soon as I added the last triangle to form the side bars, the flame would become distorted. I couldn’t figure out why this happened. Everything was fine, then a total disaster with the addition of the last triangle.

As time went by, I began to wonder that I was going about the process in a way that was fundamentally incorrect. I had relied so heavily on Carl’s tutorial that it had hindered my ability to understand what I had set out to accomplish. I realized finally that I needed to set what had been the last triangle first. It isn’t that one really needs to place this triangle first, but rather it is far simpler to design the Julian by starting with the basic framework first then building the inside details second as opposed to forcing the framework on the Julian last.

I opened up a new flame and set Triangle 1 to Blur and Triangle 2 to Julian variation 1, Variables julian_power 2 and julian_dist -1. Adding a couple more triangles produced a Julian much more similar to what I had sought. Unfortunately, while this had fixed the distortion of my previous attempts, the problem of ghost images still remained. I worked about two weeks straight trying to figure out what I was missing. It was a frustrating time, needless to say, but I kept trying. I had already devoted too many hours on this technique and I knew I almost had it.

It was by no means perfect and I still needed to figure how to properly rotate the triangles, among other things.

The Journey Continues

Oddly, it was not until I sat down to rewrite Julia Uncovered that I inadvertently moved my triangles into the proper position and achieved the look I had worked to create for so many months. It was a happy moment (and one of great relief to finally get “it”). Ironically, most people were rather blasé about my discovery, thinking I already knew how to do it. Oh well. I have it now.