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Posted: Sat Oct 21, 2006 8:00 am

Are there any .ucls which are known not to render well? Or to have problems in conjunction with certain .ufms?

I ask because a few weeks ago, I "finished" a fractal which happened to use a layer from "Metrics & Watches" - in akln.ucl - the formula was Pixel (slight move) from sam.ufm - as a texture and the result was ..... disappointing, to say the least. I thought maybe there was some peculiarity about that particular formula and changed the texture layer.

Last night I rendered a different piece which uses a texture layer of Pixel from mt.ufm and M Fractional Brownian Motion+ from akl-m-dmj.ucl and instead of my nice, slightly patterned texture, all that appeared in the render were straight diagonal lines.

So I'm wondering whether there are known issues with some ucls or if I could be doing something else wrong?

Posted: Mon Oct 23, 2006 10:04 am

I've found that sometimes textures just look different in the preview, I think because of aliasing artifacts if the textures are fine. When I'm working with textures I usually zoom in closer on just the texture layers or rezize the whole window to make it a lot larger so I can see exactly what they look like in detail... A lot of the time I will even copy the texture layer to a new fractal so I can work with it in a separate window and compare zoomed in texture to zoomed out texture at the same time. Then when you're done you can just stick it back on your main fractal. I had a lot of problems with textures turning out unexpectedly before I started doing that, the preview doesn't really show fine detail that well unless you zoom.

Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 4:07 am

Thanks Trystian! That's a useful tip, and one I'll remember, to zoom in close on textured areas before rendering.

Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 4:52 am

You're welcome, there could be a problem with the ucls, it's hard to say without seeing them. I don't think I've ever used metrics and watches for texture (or anything lol - too many ucls). Zooming usually helps with the texture surprises though. Mr. Green