Visions Of Chaos Tutorial 2 - Introduction To 3D

This tutorial gives you a brief introduction to the 3D display possibilities of Visions Of Chaos. Many of the modes support 3D display.

Change into Mandelbrot mode, load the "rain4.map" palette file and generate the default fractal image by clicking the Reset button. If this does not make sense, please refer to this tutorial before continuing.

Your display should look similar to the following.

Zoom into the left hand "spike" area of the Mandelbrot Set. Your display should look something like the following.

Zoom in another step. Try zooming into the small "minibrot" near the center of the screen. A minibrot is an area of the Mandelbrot Set that has a similar shape to the orginal fractal. Your display should look something like the following.

Click the 3D button on the toolbar (or select "3D extrude current fractal" from the "3D" menu). You will see the following dialog appear.

Eee gads! What are all these options?! For the time being, click the "Calculate & Render" button to generate a 3D representation of the fractal image. Your display should look like the following.

Overview of some of the 3D display options

OK, now let's increase the detail shown in the 3D extrusion. Click the 3D button again and make the following changes to the settings;

1. Change the "Detail Level" to 2.
2. Uncheck "Average Heights".
3. Click the Mandelbrot tab and click the "Supersample heights" checkbox.

Click the "Calculate & Render" button to generate the 3D image. Note that because of the increased detail and super sampling options, it will take longer to calculate the 3D heights.

You now see that the 3D image shows more detail around the edges of the Mandelbrot Set.

Getting a different view of the 3D image

Click the 3D button again to bring up the 3D Options dialog.

Within the "Camera View" area (the square that has the Auto-set View button), right click and drag within the area to rotate the preview mesh. You will notice that there is an arrow on the rectangle indicating which way it is pointing. Click and drag until the arrow is pointing roughly upwards, rather than downwards as it currently is. This one is hard to explain, but should be easy to understand when you click and drag.

Once the arrow is facing upwards, click the "Calculate & Render" button again and you should have an image similar to the following.

From this perspective there are a lot of sharp points and spikes. To make it look a bit smoother, click the 3D button again and click the Average Heights checkbox. Click "Calculate & Render" to see the results of averaging the heights.

End Of Tutorial 2

Hopefully this was a usefull introduction to the basics of 3D rendering in Visions Of Chaos. There are many options in the 3D Options dialog, so try them all and see what you can do. If anything drastic goes wrong, restarting Visions Of Chaos will reset the 3D settings to their defaults.