Pearls I

[Pauldelbrot]

A Kleinian group fractal with shaded balls for the "pearls". The shading is achieved by using two layers.

The image was rendered in four pieces, assembled into a 4096x3072 image, and downsampled to get rid of artifacts and improve detail over and above what anti-aliasing does. During the calculation, nearly 1GB of RAM was needed; trying to render the thing in one piece (or at 2048x1536 with depth-2 antialiasing) produced actual honest-to-God out-of-memory errors.

Freely redistributable and usable subject to the Creative Commons Attribution license, version 3.0.

Detailed statistics:
Name: Pearls I
Date: January 27, 2009
Fractal: Kleinian Groups
Location: A particular Kleinian group
Depth: Very Shallow
Min Iterations: 1
Max Iterations: 1000
Layers: 2
Anti-aliasing: 3x3, threshold 0.10, depth 1
Preparation time: 10 minutes
Calculation time: 12 hours (2GHz dual-core Athlon XP)