Orbit Traps Direct (UF5)
From Ultrafractal Wiki
Orbit Traps Direct UF5 is a Coloring Algorithm in dmj5.ucl
also see:
Orbit Traps Overview TrapShapePlayground
It's Ron's challenge, so I can't speak for him. But I can address a little the issue of being overwhelmed. You are absolutely correct that there are so many options and possibilities it can be hard to know what to do.
As I've indicated before, UF5 formulas are made of pieces, called "classes" or "objects" or "PlugIns" (the name is not really important unless you're a programmer). With UF4 you only needed to learn your favorite formulas really, really well. But with UF5 there are so many new options it's hard to know (a) what is available, and (b) how they fit together. Ron's challenges are trying to fix that.
Let me give a bit of background on Orbit Traps Direct UF5 in general that may be helpful. The essential concept is that you set up an area of interest (the "Trap") and as the point iterates through the fractal equation (the "Orbit") you watch how it goes in and out of the trap area.
There are actually several different "orbit trap" formulas (and this was true even before UF5). They all have slightly different capabilities. But at least with UF5, they can all draw from the same collection of objects to perform the various parts of the orbit trapping method.
The most obvious of these is the Trap Shape, which defines the area of interest. There are hundreds of these already. When you actually work with a Trap Shape, though, you realize it's not all that useful by itself. The Trap Shape does exactly one thing: it describes a shape, always centered at (0,0). It doesn't let you have more than one trap shape. And it reports the trap distance in a simple, linear fashion.
All of those other useful things were present in the older orbit traps formulas, but with UF5's orbit trap formulas they're structured differently. If you want multiple trap shapes, rather than require the orbit trap formula to know how to merge trap shapes and be written specifically to account for it, we wrote a "TrapShape Merge" Wrapper. It fits into a Trap Shape slot, and itself has ten slots for more trap shapes. It's like plugging in an electrical outlet adapter that has more sockets on it so you can plug more things in than just one.
Along with that is a way to accommodate positioning traps and changing the linear output. These are handled in Trap Position and Trap Transfer, respectively. In my orbit traps formula, for the basic trap I already have these included in the main formula. But if you put a TrapShape Merge into the Trap Shape slot, you don't have separate positioning for each of your included traps--they're all stuck at (0,0) and that makes merging them... far less useful!
The solution is the TrapShape Block. This is another wrapper that goes in a [Trap Shape] slot, and combines a Transform (with Trap Position pre-selected), a Trap Shape, and a Transfer (with Null Transfer selected, but you can choose Trap Transfer to get the "normal" transfer function options). With this, you can put your trap shape into the Block's trap shape slot, and you can adjust its position without altering the positions of the other merged traps.
The key to all of this is that you have to understand how objects fit inside other objects. Here's the structure we're talking about:
Orbit Traps Gradient UF5
Trap Position - affects the merged trap shape
Trap Shape -> TrapShape Merge
Slot 1 -> TrapShape Block
Trap Position - for just the first trap shape
Trap Shape -> choose something cool!
Slot 2 -> [TrapShape Block]
Trap Position - for just the second trap shape
Trap Shape -> choose something cool!
Trap Transfer - affects the merged trap shape
Trap Texture - applied to the merged trap shape
When you're trying to understand how your objects are related, make good use of the triangles on the left side of the panel to collapse nested objects and hide their parameters. This will help you see the "big picture".
I *know* this is hard. There is a lot of stuff happening all at once. You don't have to learn it all at once (all the UF4 formulas still work) but it \*is* worthwhile.
Damien
***
Thanks Damien,
That was really excellent.
Unfortunately there really isn't an intermediate step between using a trap shape and merging trap shape, and merging trap shapes is the next logical step after using a single trap shape.
Please feel free to ask questions and I will try to answer them. If you have problems with a challenge and submit a challenge that doesn't meet the rules, I will answer back to the list, as I suspect others may have similar problems, and my answers will be instructive to everyone. It is also a very good idea to read the help file in UF5. As I had mentioned on the list before, do a search on "trap" in the help file and select the "Orbit Traps" entry. That entry gives a description of all the slots/plugin-s for Orbit Traps.
Here is a rough summary of the most important aspects of the rules for challenge #2:
1. I recommend you start with the default Orbit Traps Gradient in dmj5.ulb. Use the challenge #2 sample as a guide as you make changes to the plug-ins.
2. Instead of a trap shape use TrapShape Merge. Instead of a trap texture use TrapShape Block.
3. When you replace the default Trap Shape with TrapShape Merge (which is in common.ulb) you should see parameters for merge mode, coloring source and texture source and a check box for show all slots. You will also see check boxes for Enable Trap Shape #1 and Enable Trap Shape #2 which are checked. Start by using the default values. This gives you the two trap shapes required by the rules. The default trap shapes are both "Point". Replace them with your choice. As the rules state you don't have to use Trap Position and Trap Transfer. You are only required to use the two trap shapes, which must be different.
4. When you replace the default Trap Texture with TrapShape Block (in common.ulb) You will see the appearance of new slots for Trap Position, Trap Shape and Trap Transfer. The default Trap Shape is Point. The reason for using TrapShape Block in place of the default Trap Texture is the following: Simply putting a new Trap Shape plug-in into the texture slot can produce some nice textures as all of you have demonstrated in Challenge #1. Unfortunately there is no way to modify the texture size, position, rotation, etc or to change the characteristics of the output from the texture. You are stuck with only the options the plug-in writer put into the shape. Using TrapShape Block gives you much greater control over your texture. Thats why there is a requirement for the challenge to change Trap Position and/or Trap Transfer.
I hope this helps.
Ron Barnett
"Zooreka wrote:
Frederik - as promised I had a play with The colourings again this morning after a nights sleep. I have found that The problem (seemed to be with direct Orbit Traps in dmj 5. On opening you get hit with a black screen by default. However having played with some of the switches and changed one or two of the optipons I found it works rather nicely.Here are the params for just a texturing layer I added with the formula."
CopyOfTest_03 {
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ktjQK2yg8tUclcrY0ZgJzsyddcKGVpDv5rCSS9zkHE8OG9aAHOgJNLLNOK2bCgaEBg7RcWfv
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dEnRNsu4qFS75p7k5iNxMdmMN5eI30I0Zlneu4Z4biOG0i7TORG7zLnS0246Zmy3Zm5YFkdg
0vkHHF+GkhRkvo3WSRcoJq4eXCf/xlxScobAfP/7TEq81jvA55J3H9W5bIRcBkUK9hFxZRx6
4T0JNJebpqJ+5g187zP0PAwPIcVUcy1OXYU4WHMG6ip/peH3Y5Q7W6RdvK3rnnPG60p1CCq+
FPDph9/6Xsy1VTVPK3Re9oprCHk8+y3y9Dd6fiifcSSSgfkxecmxeQin0qOkaYEHbGKJLJbV
Woxegf65lS+6en9PDy0z/Y/iQNA92/3JEEJfc2fA0iv7AD==
}
Hi Zoo,
That coloring always opens with a sort-of black image, but if you look closely you'll see that it actually is a subtly colored image (for the default Mandelbrot set at least).
Inside Parallels, have you set your Windows screen settings to '32-bit color'?
Best regards, Frederik Slijkerman
