T.I.N.A. was never intended to be a rival product to Apophysis but is grown in a such rapid way and has such many features that in fact it now could be considered a rival product.
So I sometimes receive questions like “It looks like Apo so why should I use it?” or “You seem not to know Apo, doesn’t you?”
Yes, I know Apophysis and in fact I considered to create a branch of it before I started to create my own fractal flame editor. But I had certain goals which did not fit to the codebase of Apophysis. This does not mean anything against anything in Apophysis! In fact I like it very much and are enjoying to just play around with it. My favourite version is still 2.09. It’s very fast and has those nice thumbnails.
So I had just some innovations in mind which could not be done easily with Apo and now it is grown much faster than I ever thought.
I see currently the following key innovations/differences:
- JWildfire has a realtime preview in the editor – but the Apo preview is more precise
- JWildfire allows to use flames as variations in any depth
- JWildfire features HDR output (32bits per channel)
- JWildfire has a Pseudo3D shader which gives more realistic results for 3D renders
- Apo has a huge collection of plugins but they can not used all together – JWildfire has less but still many of built-in plugins which can be used together
- JWildfire features an integrated compiler to create own plugins on the fly
- JWildfire is plattform-independent and stable like a rock – but Apo is faster (by a factor of 2, depends on the formulas)
- JWildfire needs no proprietary development tools
