The palette will dramatically change your Dragon Egg. If you click on the button shown in the figure "Rotate" Apophysis will allow you to change the different settings such as Saturation, Hue, Frequency, Contrast.... You should definitely get familiar with this feature.

NOTE TO DESIGNERS: Should they ever read this. I would love to see all the functions in one longer window where you can adjust the settings at the same time.

When you get a palette you like, on any flame or Dragon Egg, I highly recommend you save the palette. You will find that two Dragon Eggs will look totally different even with the same palette as they use the colors in the palette differently. The buttons to Copy, Paste, Load and Save gradients are the icons in the lower right of the palette screen.

One thing you will nearly always have to do is center the Dragon Egg within the window. This is almost always accomplished by setting the values of X and Y to 0 but on locations I have had to offset the image slightly.

Here you will also adjust the Zoom and I usually set this as high as possible. The sliders are real touchy so use them lightly.

Lastly, here you can tweak the Gamma, Brightness, and Vibrancy of the Dragon Egg to make it more intense or dim it down a bit. Most people will want to tweak these way up but I recommend you try some of the softer settings and play with earth tones for a different looking dragon.

There is nothing that says you have to save your Dragon Eggs. However should you ever want to revisit the creation and tweak or re-render the image at a higher resolution, you will need these files.

Dragon Eggs (and all Apophysis flames) are saved in .flame files within the Apophysys parameters folder. I recommend you back these files up if they are important to you.

I recommend you always save before rendering your work. I have been able to crash the program during renders and was fortunate that I had backed everything up.

And finally, we get to the part that makes it all worth it. We get to render the artwork.

Check the maintain aspect ratio if you wish to maintain the same aspect ratio have been working in and do this prior to changing the Height or Width settings.

You will note that I am rendering to a .jpg file. At the time of writing this tutorial, there was a bug in Apophysis that would crash on large .jpg files though the settings above should be okay. If you plan to render larger, I recommend you use .bmp or .png files.

Alpha Channel or Transparencies. - It is possible to create Dragon Eggs that you can place over other images using the black background as a transparency. To do this, you must render a .png file and have a program such as Photoshop which can handle .png files and Alpha Channels.

If you are simply rendering these for the web, and do not plan to use transparencies I recommend you use the .jpg setting. If you use the .jpg setting, be sure to set the quality to 100% within the General tab of the Options > Options dialog window.

Okay, you're ready. Click on the Render button and be prepared to wait a while. These can take a bit of time to render out.

NOTE: You can go ahead and use Apophysis to generate new Dragon Eggs while rendering one. This will of course slow the render time down but is sometimes worth doing.

I also recommend you look up some of the scripts by others which will allow you to render an entire Clutch (batch) of Dragon Eggs overnight while you sleep.

I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial and if you have and have created some cool Dragon Eggs using the techniques described here, please do share and let us see your work.

Feel free to send me the images or links to your art galleries. You can also send me the code for the Dragon Egg if you like but keep in mind that this is your artwork and you may not want to give away the files used to create the art. To send the flame itself, just go to the main Apophysis window and click on Edit > Copy. Then Paste the contents in to your email message. Anyone who has the program can then copy and paste the flame in to Apophysis.