Welcome to Fractal Forums

Fractal Software => FractInt => Topic started by: Belbo on February 09, 2014, 07:17:35 PM




Title: Smooth color transition on Fractint
Post by: Belbo on February 09, 2014, 07:17:35 PM
Hello all,

I'm new to the forum and new on creating fractals (although a veteran in-terms of the theory behind them). After a lot of years I've started using Fractint again: it's a great piece of software and well, I like the fact that it's still in use 25 years after.

One thing I have been struggling with is color boundaries: well, I don't like them. Given the 256 color restriction, is there a way to move to gradual color transition without boundaries either from within Fractint or post? (Gimp for example). I've tried some things (e.g. increasing the number of iterations), but really didn't make a difference. I understand xaos has a "smooth" function where it makes it gradual, that's exactly what I'm looking for.

I would appreciate any feedback, thanks!

Belbo


Title: Re: Smooth color transition on Fractint
Post by: simon.snake on February 09, 2014, 08:35:46 PM
Hi

I still play with FractInt, especially the formula parser, although I'm not too clued up with the maths involved in creating fractals, I just play about with my 'ideas' to see what I can come up with.

With regard to the colouring method in FractInt, the dos based version was able to be used with 'true colour' graphics modes.  I use a version of FractInt that runs well in Windows, a pre release development version.  I don't know what version you are using, but I'm sure it's not too difficult to edit the configuration file to give you the extra modes on the dos based version.

One other thing to think about is that the source code to FractInt is available if you fancy trying to have a go yourself.  The only trouble is that if you stick to a 256 colour mode you're limited to the number of colours that can be physically displayed on the screen, so I don't know how you go about adding extra colours to the palette.

I was playing with FractInt and I managed somehow to create a sort of dithered band of iterations in between other bands, so maybe that's a way to do it.  Here is a link to the post (http://www.fractalforums.com/index.php?topic=17344.0) I put up soon after discovering this.  Maybe with some tweaking it could be fine tuned?


Title: Re: Smooth color transition on Fractint
Post by: Belbo on February 11, 2014, 12:41:16 PM
Thank you both for taking the time to answer back to me!

I'm using Fractint for Windows (the 21 beta 5 version) which unfortunately is still limited to 256 colors. Having said that, it runs great on Windows 7 and there are a lot of things that I can now do with this software, so I don't complaint. The DOS version does run on DOSBox, still it's very slow under Windows 7.

The idea of the 3D color maps sounds great I would really like to try it and see how it works. Thank you for sharing the files.

I guess the next big step for Fractint would be to go >256 colors on Windows.

cheers!


Title: Re: Smooth color transition on Fractint
Post by: Belbo on February 11, 2014, 06:09:55 PM
I would love to try out Multifractal however I have completely uninstalled FractInt for DOS as it was running very slowly + I had trouble with the video modes, practically I could only make it work with 16 colors. I'm planning to try to load it to FractInt for Windows at some point though.