Thanks jehovajah. Need to do better with the AA, and perhaps alter coloring a bit more. Found a darker set of colors for the next image I am working on, but not doing any AA, as the render job will take 15 hours opposed to 2.5 hours.
visual- thanks for exploring the formulas,
GPU version of the formulas is waiting for another implementer or my next computer. I'm not too sure of what kind of benefit (maybe 4x speed - memory transfer times) I could coax out of my 8600m GT (DDR2 type), not to mention I don't know if it has double floats, which are probably essential for any decent zooms into these formulas. Also, I'm not sure what freeware compiler I should use.
Coloring mixes? I'm just learning about them myself. First of all, ChaosPro's help files are pretty informative, so if you haven't checked them out: open up help, scroll down to "Fractal Parameter Windows" and expand that menu, expand "Quaternion Parameters" and select "Coloring Tab", then read up a bit. I should probably look it over some more myself.
I've been picking the "Orbital Coloring" formula from the color formula list for quaternions and unchecking "orbital coloring". To get more changes for extreme zooms, you need to select high speed (50) and set mapping to "cube". I mess with the offsets to find a distribution of colors that I like, and I also just started using the palette editor last night. I selected a preset palette that made my fractal look cool, then altered it with the palette editor to create the color scheme I wanted.
Of course, with extreme zooms, you start getting to the point where even "cube" mapping isn't enough to provide a good range of colors, so I am going to write an updated "orbital coloring" formula with scalable mapping of some sort (so that even at extreme zooms, we get a nice variety of colors).
The mandala formula, although it isn't truly fractal, makes some very neat animations if you select "bail control mode", set one of the bails to -1 and set the other one to +2 (or some other positive/negative combination). I varied the rotations/ magnitudes of a mandala mode object in these low resolution animations:
http://www.youtube.com/v/T_Ws7f5kPkc&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1
http://www.youtube.com/v/7QH0cQIvK4I&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1 You don't even have to do high iterations or high resolution with mandala images, which makes it nice for rendering quick low resolution animations.
I've already implemented a higher dimensional (5, not 3) version of some of the formulas, but that is just SLOOOOWWWWWWWWW, so will have to wait for my next computer (which will have a decent GPU) before I make animations from it.