Welcome to Fractal Forums

Hi all,
I just uploaded the final beta of MB3D 1.90 for open beta-testing, in order to find ugly bugs which occur on systems which were not already tested.

For a list of changes  see below.

If you find any bug or blocker, please report it here. If you are not a member of this forum and got the link from somebody else, please tell him to report your problem.

Please, do not send me email, personal messages etc., better let us collect all stuff here in this thread.

Please, do not report feature-requests, wishes or questions at this thread, because this BETA-testing phase is only intended to find bugs/blockers on configurations which were not already tested yet - it will already end at 23th December!

Thank you!

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Final changes which will make it into the release:

- Support for animated (height)maps! (Use the new "Map Sequences"-window in the Prefs-section to define them
  and to assign the sequence to a map channel)

- new MutaGen-module to easily explore new combinations of formulas and settings
   - four types of mutations:
       - add, remove, exchange formulas
       - modify params of formulas
       - modify Julia-mode
       - modify iteration count
   - in the UI you may turn on/off those types individually, by specifying a weight, and you may specify an additional
     strength-parameter
   - you may browse through the already generated generations of mutations and restart on interesting results
   - you may resize the window to alter the size of the generated thumbnail images
   - you may cancel/restart the mutation-process at any time (sometimes there occur combinations of parameters
     which may lead to "endless" calculations, in such cases it is helpful to be able to just restart)
   - WARNING: some formula-combinations may crash the program, so save often!
   - This is just the first version, e.g. interpolated functions are not supported yet!
   - Please note that it is intented that this module does not create ready-to-use artworks from scratch.
     It can only happen, when you put in well made parameters (whith everything what makes a great artwork),
     that the mutation will keep many of those properties, making it a nice artwork.
     Or in short: the better your input, the better the output.

- Navigator-size may now be altered (you must expand the right toolbar to see the "Navigator size" control),
  the last setting is stored to the ini-file

- Global rework of the UI, added theme-support, made "Glossy" the default theme

- Formula-Window:
    - exchanging of formulas now works in two directions

- integrated formula-editor for creating/editing JIT-compiled formulas (see the new buttons in the formula window)
   - support for MB3D's parameters and constants
   - preprocessor to deal with the parameter-handling code
   - backed by the commercial PaxCompiler
   - included support for about 50 mathematical functions
   - watch out for formulas with the prefix "JIT" for examples!

- Many new formulas from the community at fractalforums.com

- New Info-Section at the main window, which now has a button to reach the official bug-reporting tool
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Here is the temporary link (which will also expire in a couple of days): http://www.andreas-maschke.de/java/tmp/Mandelbulb3Dv190FINALBETA.zip (http://www.andreas-maschke.de/java/tmp/Mandelbulb3Dv190FINALBETA.zip)

Best regards,
Andreas

wow, super nice! .... aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand: i am first! :D

  Quick pointer for some people: might need to reset initialization directories because they are set to Andreas's... :D


  Thanks Andreas!!!

Mutagen is awesome!  Already have ideas about its use.  

  First "bug" is that the navigator screen constantly flickers...  flickers while it's calculating.  Not constantly... and it's not enough to ruin the experience.  I bet on a faster machine it's not a problem.

Mutagen is definitely awesome.

No issues loading and rendering 1.8.9 .m3i files.

Minor bug: Navigator Window > Show cords + Navigator Size change: the coordinate arrows are fixed at 1.8.9 position. These do not recentre themselves to the new window size.

How do i use the heightmap image animation sequencer?
i started a new one begining with image 10 to 174 step incriment 1
i assume target map slot would be my first formula (or the first heightmap formula used)
saved and exited and it saved a cfg file with my settings.
now what do i do?

*Edit*
i see the frame slot at the bottom of the main window.

i still need to keyframe every frame slot?

also a note on screen flicker.
i set my view to 100% and restarted and it stopped.

And talking about Map Sequence: minor bug - you can set increment to 0 --> Division by zero error

Ooh, fun! :)


Tiniest possible, non-fatal bug: when I right-click on a mutation to use the 'send parameters to clipboard' feature, the final close-bracket on the title is missing.

Oh, and when I open the program, the beta warning popup gives me an error message when I click on 'OK': '24.12.2015 is not a valid date'. I guess that's some kind of locale issue -- my computer speaks ENG (UK) in Windows 10. Also, changing the theme pops up the beta warning again. But I guess debugging the beta-ness of the beta is not a high priority. ;)

How do i use the heightmap image animation sequencer?


ERICR

hi there, just took a quick test of the mutagen feature - and all i can say is: WOW! this is really ultra smooth and enables a whole new world to explore easily
and the whole ui looks just fantastic!

Yes a great release!

It would be nice to add, into the jit editor window, the informations about the members of PIteration3D. :)

It crashed once, while searching for the formulas, but I couldn't reproduce it. After setting the directories, everything works smoothly.

Navigation in navigator window doesn't work as expected: some controls gives an error message box: " 'NavSlideStep' is not a valid integer value."(edit): Reuploaded It and now it works very well (except flickering).

To make a test on how fast the JIT is, here is attached the formula (IQ bulb simplified).
on an I3 processor (video preset):
JITed : 16s
Original: 9s
Not bad at all!

BTW!
One can already define constants inside the code. Also it is possible to add "helper" functions:

:thumbsup1:

Thargor, thank you for MB3D.   :D :thanks1:
On AMD card with Crimson drivers there are  minor flickerings when rotating/translating the view in navigator.

Awesome work on here thargor :D

I don't know if these count as bugs or not, as they are only slightly off. Please, if this are not bugs, just tell me so, don't bashing me for saying it.

First: I tried this with WINE. It works without flaws :D Improved times and amazing mutation mode.

1. The initial directories don't grab the location of the program file like before.  (nothing that can't be solved in less than a minute, but maybe is important for final users).
2. Black lists. I don't know if it is WINE or is a more wide issue This is only a WINE issue: http://sta.sh/0hgb7mq3n1m (http://orig03.deviantart.net/a359/f/2015/354/e/8/pantallazo_del_2015_12_20_13_45_32_by_jakeukalane__by_jakeukalane-d9krgbg.png)
(http://orig15.deviantart.net/741d/f/2015/354/d/9/pantallazo_del_2015_12_20_13_46_00_by_jakeukalane__by_jakeukalane-d9krgge.png)
[3. Maybe is a feature, so if it is just ignore it: the buttons of the windows are at the right and not at the left of the windows. I don't know how can be changed. The previous M3D and also Jwildfire behaves under WINE with the buttons at the left, so WINE relocated correctly the buttons.]


Edit:
4. I tried to mutate some parameters and this message appears:
(http://orig01.deviantart.net/589f/f/2015/354/5/2/error_by_jakeukalane-d9kskzg.png)

I think that there are some formulas with caps changed. When I look to the parameter selector it says (as in the message): Cayley2ifs. When I select from the program it say normally cayley2ifs so is a minor issue between versions.

Thank  you SO much for this Roy :)

there is flickering  on diffuse color when sliding.

 :D :D :D :D :D Thanks a Million Andreas!!! We all appreciate your hard work!!!!

Minor Look and feel bug with MutaGen window: if you resize the window - the red lines do not realign to the new generation windows until the Mutate! button is clicked and the mutations have completed.

Medium severity bug: If you start rendering a fractal in the main window (Calculate 3D button clicked); then while that is still rendering - bring up the Mutagen window and Mutate! - the application terminates (no error message).

Observation: Mutagen is not completing all mutations before completing. For example, of the 14 mutations - 9 images were generated, 5 images were blank / white.
This could be due to the selection of formula is too random - picking up formula that are not valid for the method (e.g. Difs when Alternate is the method) as I can see lots of "Error, formula option is not valid" messages.

Andreas, i've been playing with new Mandelbulb3D for the last 2 hours, had a problem early on then fixed had a navigator screen flitter fixed it, everything seems to be working pretty good, so glad you put the Muta-Generator in it, it does give out some unique images, THANX AGAIN Andreas, you did an excellent job! :w00t:

i would like to see the heightmap sequencer as an animation option.
with every subframe the heightmap should increase by increment.
that way i can zoom and move per keyframe and mb3d will iterate subframes with an average of movement rotation, etc and the heightmap will be increased by incriment automatically by subframe.

maybe im not using right or dont understand.

Thank you so very much, Andreas - now I have two favourite programs - and you've been central for each of them! I know what I will be doing this Christmas - working on your fabulous creations! I hope that you will be celebrating your accomplishments. Be well and deep gratitude! ~ Kathleen Farago May

I don't have previews after calculating in the mutagen dialog (I suppose I should).

I also have the '24.12.2015 is not a valid date' error message on start.

I recieved a popup saying i needed to stop main render first.

I think, I do not understand exactly what do you mean (probably due to a language barrier), but it works as follows:
 - You define an image sequence by filename, start frame, end frame, loop setting and frame increment
 - You assign this sequence to a logical map channel (any number) you wish
 - You use this channel as map number in your fractal, e.g. as color map or heightmap

 - Now you can preview the state at frame x by changing the frame number in the main view (this is just for test render, not for animating)
 - When you use this fractal in the animation window, the map will now be animated, i.e. at each frame of the animation the corresponding frame of the map will be calculated (accordingly to the settings you made) and the image-file will be loaded. If no image file is found it is asumed to be "black".

I hope this helps,
Andreas

Once the public release version I was planning on doing a video tutorial on how to use heightmaps with animations

Cool, thanks :-)

BETA Final does not work under wine. It starts after throwing an error that 24.12.2015 isn't a valid date, but once one hits one single control it hangs completely. The previous 1.90 beta did work fine. Something got very much broken in this update, but since wine fails to spit out a stacktrace I can't say more sadly. So no 1.9 for anyone not on windows I am afraid until this can be hunted down and fixed :(

Love it!
Ui is much better.
No bugs found till now.
No crashes.

I havn't had time to do heavy testing, but it seems to work fine for me om Mac using slock's wrapper: http://www.fractalforums.com/mandelbulb-3d/mandelbulb-3d-for-mac-!-%28with-updates-!%29/

i love the mutage window, as a starter already nicely working but my head explodes of possibilities for that:

mutagen
- the nice red lines are not scaling with the window
- scaling of content is nice, but behaviour when scaling and recalculation is confusing, especially when used on a huge 4k display ;)
- fitness functions :D e.g. 2dimensional color difference for given input image ... :)
- is there a way to define valid parameter ranges inside formulas ?
- some formula combinations make the program crash, did not record what formulas made the problems

formula view
- layered display of formulas would be nice instead of the tabbed view, especially empty formula tabs with followed tabs with formulas are very confusing

I am talking about 1.90 final beta, the 1.90 alpha version works fine under Wine, as does the 1.89v2 version.

Edit: Resolved this by recompiling wine from source, now the final beta is working as it should, so far so good!

So do I, I uploaded it from this thread... (I do get the 24.12.2015 isn't a valid date error though..)

A few bugs - just found them and don't have time to completely verify all of them, but thought I should report:
1. Pressing Reset in formulas doesn't bring back the original bulb, but a somewhat melted looking version of it, with the same formula. A previous time I tried this, and a very different image came up, but it still read in the Formula window as Integer Power.
2. I made a series of simple edits and saved incrementally. The program crashed (can't recall what I was doing) and when I restarted and open 4 of the 5 files I had saved, they all had the same params - as if I had saved the same file over and over again.
3. The Navi window only resizes using the arrows, but not using the corners, as I have read some are able to do - I am on a Win 7 system.

Over all -  I am very pleased with the work you have done, Andreas - as always! Thank you!

I thought that the alpha version supported 10 formulas, the final is back to 6. I deleted the alpha by mistake, so can't check, but what happened to that feature?

Would have been very much additional work (e. g. rewrite of some formulas and the need for a whole family of new file-format-revisions), but actually no user demanded it, so it  was dropped for now, will come probably later (in any form).

All good Andreas, much appreciated! The mutagen is awesome, not yet worked all the other stuff enough to have found any serious issues, just some sliders that seem to not want to draw in the default thee until used. But otherwise working fine thus far. More than 6 formulas would be sometimes nice (especially if working with dIFSs, but not a priority, just wondering....

In JIT:
If one of the arguments is removed (say w) and then pressing save+exit -> It says compilation successfull then crashes. The file is not saved.

I love the eight formula version!  the only problems i saw with it are in the navi. a couple of minor formula swap and shift bugs aren't really a problem and i assume easily fixed.

is great for ifs.
i did a decombinated alternating rotation transoform- tiled- gear- helix- video using all eight formulas.

https://www.facebook.com/Chunkygravy/videos/1000911963315418/?l=2059538209845712654

Nice video!

The enhanced formula-slots will come back, for sure, would have been to many changes at once.

Cheers!

Sweet.  now about a ten formula version...lol...jk.

You're doing great work Thargor and i really appreciate all you done.  I understand trying to improve on Jesse's Legacy is a tedious process and you're trying to do things right.  I can't wait for what the New Year brings.

Merry Christmas to everyone involved @ FractalForums

Tutorial!!!! How to use animated height-maps using new 1.90 MB3D
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCLtX29S-4k

Well explained! Cheers! :-)

TY TY Snickers.
i was changing the map munber in the formula params.  when i should of left it 1 for the slot #

nice vid snickers. and good work Thargor i was confused earlier and it works great.

https://youtu.be/MNoyC_l2HzQ

Excellent job!  I absolutely love the MutaGen module. So much fun to play with. :)

However, I found a typo. The tooltip of the "Calculate 3D" button shows "Sart ..." instead of "Start ...".