Slope and Lighting Formulas

From Ultrafractal Wiki

For tutorial see: UF5 Tutorial #6

A caution from Ron from the above tutorial:

"I advise against "Slope" in standard.ulb as it has no plugins for height value and so much of the flexibility of of "slope" is lost. Similarly, I advise against using the coloring formula "Lighting" in standard.ulb as it has no options for managing colors and textures. Instead use "[Lighting with Textures Direct]]" in reb5.ucl."

also see:

   Decreasing Edge Sharpness with Slope Lighting
   Slope Enhanced and Slope with Shapes

---

Hi Ron,

When I load TrapShape Block into the shape slot of the slope formula I find I cannot change various parameters. Especially the size of the trap shape stays unchanged which is a pity because sometimes the shapes just don't look right when they are over sized. Do you see a possibility to make these parameters work?

Nada

Hi Nada,

The demo example uses TrapShape Block, and the size of the trap shape is managed through Trap Position, with Trap Scale = 0.3. Transforms also work. Look at Tutorial_13 (in UF5 Tutorial #6).

Ron Barnett

---

Hi,

Just to point out that all the "Slope" formulas will be slower than the equivalent "normal" formula because getting the slope values requires the fractal calculations done for at least three points per pixel on screen rather than the usual one point per pixel. (There is a way round that problem but at the moment it would have the drawback that you wouldn't generally be able to produce large print size renders when using slope formulas).

I mean that as far as challenge 6 is concerned the delay problem stems more from using the "slope" method rather than using the new features of UF5.

bye Dave