Welcome to Fractal Forums

Long-time lurker, first-time poster... ^_^;;

I've been into fractals every since that Aug 1985 Scientific American cover. I went home from the library that day and coded up a Mandelbrot display & zoom program using text 'graphics' on a Commodore 64, then promptly tracked down "The Fractal Geometry of Nature" and read it cover to cover (most of it flying way over my head *grin*). I've been hooked ever since.

I spent a lot of time with Fractint in the early 90s, but mostly I've written my own code, although I like Xaos for its simplicity and smooth real-time zooming. And of course over the years I've lurked around forums like these and marveled at the awesome stuff people generate! Mad props to the universe of fractal contributors!  ;D

Recently (as in, within the last 12 or 24 months...) I came across http://www.utopiansky.com/labratory/fractals/ (http://www.utopiansky.com/labratory/fractals/) and after playing around with zooms and perturbations of non-Mandelbrot, non-Julia planes I was re-inspired to explore 3d slices of the original, untweaked Mandelbrot set.

Particularly, I wanted to find movies showing a particular 3d slice (say, Cr, Ci & Zr) with "time" being the 4th axis (say, Zi). And if they colored the surface ala Nick Lilavois' "Fill Magnitude Rendermode", all the better! (I noticed that for prime values of max iteration, the "Fill Magnitude" rendering gave visual hints about periodicity)

But since I couldn't find anything, I decided to write my own (I probably should have used something like Ultrafractal, but half of the fun is the vectors and math and coding so I'm doing my own voxel raytracer in Java  :evil1: ) and come out of lurker mode to share what I find.

Thanks again to you all for several years of awesome stuff, and hopefully I'll be able to give a little back!

- Mike

PS - For those who recall the 8/85 SciAm article, I found a reference to the cover on Picasa, see http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/BP0l4UhyFFF2RFgkwZFU5w (http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/BP0l4UhyFFF2RFgkwZFU5w)  :)

hi there and welcome to the forum .. and great outcome :D


ok, for me it is likewise, implemented 1989 an amiga basic fractal routine ( from a book )
and bough fractal nature around 2000, and was also unable to understand it, and also wrote some fractal software ( playing around with alternating formulas, as now easily available in ultrafractal ( mutatorkammer )

so, welcome to the forum again!
 O0 O0 O0

Just wanted to wish you a very late welcome to this forum !!!    :)


But am now wondering how your Java project is coming along ???  Any images yet to share with the group ??