09-10-2014, 08:42 AM
The reasons for that are mostly historical - the first versions of XD had only iterators, holon sequence coloring and parametric gradients. But there's another reason: HS coloring doesn't use gradients directly, but mixes increments from the gradients according to the holon at each iteration. The rate at which you want the colors to vary in the gradient depends on the holon scales. Parametric gradients have Gain and other controls that give quick adjustment of not only a whole gradient but the gradients for multiple holons. It doesn't give good control but does allow quick experimenting. When you use custom gradients with HS coloring, you get good control of one gradient at a time, but editing the gradient is a slow way to affect the holon coloring (and the gradient for each holon affects the whole fractal). They can work very well, but it's a case of browsing through the custom gradient presets to find something that works before editing the gradients directly. You need to find the right rates of change of colors in the early part of the gradients, as well as the choice of those colors.
Since the early days I generally avoid using HS coloring with any constructors because it colors them with noise instead of any patterns. In that case I prefer to use Metamorph coloring and let the iterators inherit all, inherit color, and use their Iteration Shift to rotate the inherited gradients at each iteration. But without any constructors, this isn't so good because at least one iterator has to have a pure color or pattern to be inherited, and the pattern is either stripes or based on some metamorph.
So the best case for HS coloring is with all iterators. With a spiral there will be many iterations of the largest holon and a good portion of the gradients will be used, but with smaller holon scales there may be only the first 5 to 20% of the gradients used so they need to have enough color variation there.
Since the early days I generally avoid using HS coloring with any constructors because it colors them with noise instead of any patterns. In that case I prefer to use Metamorph coloring and let the iterators inherit all, inherit color, and use their Iteration Shift to rotate the inherited gradients at each iteration. But without any constructors, this isn't so good because at least one iterator has to have a pure color or pattern to be inherited, and the pattern is either stripes or based on some metamorph.
So the best case for HS coloring is with all iterators. With a spiral there will be many iterations of the largest holon and a good portion of the gradients will be used, but with smaller holon scales there may be only the first 5 to 20% of the gradients used so they need to have enough color variation there.