Visions Of Chaos Tutorial 1 - Getting Started Using Visions Of Chaos

At first glimpse, using Visions Of Chaos can be a daunting task. If you are not familiar with many of the terms used in the software it can be even more daunting. This tutorial will give you an introduction to using Visions Of Chaos and hopefully make you more confident when using it.

The "Mode" menu

Visions Of Chaos supports many different "modes" including fractals, cellular automata, attractors etc. You select which mode you want to use from the (surprise, surprise) Mode menu. The various modes are seperated by catagories that they relate to.

When you start Visions Of Chaos for the first time, the default Mode selected is "Mandelbrot Set" under "Fractals". You will see that the current selected mode has a tick next to it when selected. You will also notice that the current mode name is shown in the lower left hand corner of the application.

Generating Images

Once you select a mode that you want to use, you can generate an image by clicking the "Play" button (green triangle). Depending on which mode selected, you may have to click the "Reset" button to start a mode.

Assuming you still have the Mandelbrot mode selected, clicking the Reset button will bring up the Options dialog.

At first you may be intimidated by the numerous options with wierd names that mathematicians have come up with. The more you use and experiment with Visions Of Chaos, the more you will get used to these and understand what they do. For the time being, click the Generate button and you will get an image of the Mandelbrot Set fractal.

Color Palettes

Visions Of Chaos supports many different color schemes for the various modes. These are refered to as color palettes.

To change the current color palette for the displayed fractal, select "Load color palette..." from the "File" menu, or click the Open Palette File button on the toolbar. You should see a dialog like the following image.

You will notice a long list of palette files that are included with Visions Of Chaos. As you click on their names you will notice that the right hand side of the dialog updates a preview of what the palette looks like. Scroll up the list of files and highlight the color palette named "Jason35.MAP".

Click the Load button to load the selected color palette.

Now click the Play button to regenerate the fractal image with the new color palette (for the time being leave all the settings at their default values and just click the Generate button). You will now see the same fractal image, but with the new color palette.

Sample Files

Most of the Modes in Visions Of Chaos have sample files to allow you to see what sort of things are possible to create with the mode. Select "Open FRA File..." from the "File" menu, or click the "Open FRA File" button on the toolbar. You will see the following dialog.

Scroll the list of files down and highlight "jewel box.fra". You will see that when you click on a file name in the list, a small preview image is displayed of the file name. This helps when you have a lot of parameter files and want to quickly browse through them.

Click the Load button (Select Yes to load the palette file from the FRA file) and the fractal image will automatically be generated in the main window.

Now try loading another color palette for the fractal, or try loading other FRA files.

Zooming In and Out of Fractals

To see more details within a fractal, you can zoom in to it. Fractals are infinitely complex. In theory you can zoom forever into a fractal. In practice, due to the floating point precision of Visions Of Chaos, you can zoom in roughly 15 times. This is still an enormous area to explore. At the maximum zoom limits, if you could see the original Mandelbrot set it would be roughly the size of the orbit of Jupiter!

While still in Mandelbrot mode, click the Reset button and click Generate. This will take you back to the top level original Mandelbrot Set image.

There are 2 types of zooming supported by Visions Of Chaos. Single-click zooming and Rubber Band zooming. Single-click zooming is the simplest way to zoom into a fractal and is the default zoom style. The zoom styles are controlled by the 4 zoom buttons on the toolbar.

The first 2 zoom buttons represent Single-click zooming in and out of a fractal and the second 2 represent Rubber band zooming in and out. The first zoom button is "down" so this means that when the fractal image is clicked Visions Of Chaos will zoom the image at that location.

Click an area you want to see more details of. For the following picture, I clicked near the left-hand horizontal "spike" part of the Mandelbrot Set.

You can explore further by zooming deeper into the fractal.

Improving the quality of Mandelbrot Set output

Due to the fact that every pixel in the Mandelbrot Set has infinitely many points within it, using just one calculation per pixel can lead to a somewhat pixelated or blocky image. Using the Supersample option can make the resulting fractal image much more aesthetically pleasing.

Load the "merging2.fra" file. You will get the following display.

Once it has loaded, click the Play button, but this time click the "Supersample" checkbox before you click Generate. Supersampling calculates 4 pixels for every 1 displayed pixel and then averages them to show the single pixel. This does mean that the calculation time takes 4 times as long, but the resulting image is much smoother and shows more of the fine spiral details.

End Of Tutorial 1

This concludes the first of the tutorials. I hope it was helpful in giving you a quick intro to Visions Of Chaos. Of course their are many more features, but most of the modes do use these similar principals of color palettes, sample files and zooming. You should feel more confident with trying the other modes and seeing what they can do.