END OF AN ERA, FRACTALFORUMS.COM IS CONTINUED ON FRACTALFORUMS.ORG

Thank you for stating that more diplomatically than I could ever have done!

I was debating locking or moving this thread to a hidden section as it was obviously deteriorating to bickering.

I shall remind all involved that in advertising law it is perfectly fine to say "I am The Best!" or "This program beats every other program out there!"  but it is considered slander to say my program is better than {name of some competing specific program}.

So if we could please limit these statements to either specific statistic comparisons or just broad general statements, things would be much less heated.

Thanks. 

Viewers, we need to make sure your browser is color managed first before you proceed.
This link: http://photographylife.com/is-your-browser-color-managed will tell you if it is or not.

If its not color managed, this article will tell you which browsers you can use: http://petapixel.com/2012/06/25/is-your-browser-color-managed/
(Might be out-of-date. I read somewhere that last fall, Chrome had finally become color managed.)

Far, the image you posted did not have a color profile to it, so I used the Mac ColorSync Utility to tag one copy of the image as sRGB and one as AdobeRGB.
Here are the two tagged images:

Far's Chaotica Image tagged with sRGB color profile


Far's Chaotica Image tagged with AdobeRGB color profile


Viewers, if these two images look the same your browser is definitely NOT color managed and will not show the correct image colors.

The AdobeRGB color profile has a wider color gamut, so the fractal will show more color saturation.
The actual pixels in the file are not changed (no color matching done). The only difference between the files is the attached color profile.
The browser uses the file's attached color profile to know how to interpret the color values in the image.

Flam4CUDA for Mac (I am its author) and all Fractal Architect versions are color managed and ask for the color profile to attach to the
image files it produces. I personally prefer AdobeRGB over sRGB for the richer colors.

All these images produced by Fractal Architect in this post were rendered on this Mac laptop:
Retina Mid 2012  15" Macbook Pro  (laptop) with a Nvidia GeForce GT 650M and i7 CPU with 8 Gb of memory.
The native display resolution of this particular Mac is 2880 x 1800 pixels (its Apple's 15" Retina display).

Fractal Architect 3d version 3.1.2 was used to produce these images.
The current release available today (January 10, 2014) on the Mac App Store is version 3.1.1.
The next post will have commentary on the changes made for version 3.1.2.

Fractal Architect 3D image rendered with this GPU and color profile sRGB.   Render quality 5000. Super Sampling Width: 0.35 pixels Adaptive Gamma: OFF


Fractal Architect 3D image rendered with this GPU and color profile AdobeRGB.   Render quality 5000. Super Sampling Width: 0.35 pixels Adaptive Gamma: OFF


Fractal Architect 3D image rendered with Intel i7 CPU and color profile sRGB.   Render quality 5000. Super Sampling Width: 0.35 pixels Adaptive Gamma: OFF


Fractal Architect 3D has a new render setting called Adaptive Gamma (discussed in next post).

Fractal Architect 3D image rendered with this GPU and color profile sRGB.   Render quality 5000. Super Sampling Width: 0.35 pixels Adaptive Gamma: ON

Adaptive Gamma

If you study the mathematic logic used by all flame fractals renderers today, there are in fact two erroneous assumptions in the math formula
used to convert a specific pixel's histogram value to the final pixel's RGBA color value.

Those incorrect assumptions are:

1)  100% of the points in the renderer point pool are retained by the fractal and hit the histogram.
2)  Every point in the point pool is 100% fused.

For example, for the competition fractal the retained fraction is only 30% - not 100%. (See Histogram stats shown in histogram view)
That means that the calculated gamma value used to convert the histogram to the RGBA color value is incorrect.

The main effect of this error on the image is that the output image will be dimmer than it should be and color saturation be lower.
You can manually compensate for this error by just tweaking the Gamma value of course.

Fractal Architect 3D has a new optional Adaptive Gamma on/off setting. If turned on, FA will correct the gamma value for the retained point fraction and fused
fraction. The last image in the images post above was produced with Adaptive Gamma turned on.
Note the improved tonal range, brightness, and color saturation.

Of course, you could fiddle with the Gamma setting too to achieve the same affect. Adaptive Gamma just gets you a lot closer to the ideal image without you having to play with the Gamma value.


Anti-Aliasing

Fractal Architect (all versions), Flam4CUDA for both Mac and PC uses a Gaussian Dither algorithm to achieve anti-aliasing.
Its only setting is called Super Sample Width whose units are in pixels. A good default value is 0.35 pixel.

That was the setting used in the FA images shown above.

Fractal Architect does not support Flam3 Super Sampling where you render the image to twice the size of the desired image size and have the renderer produce an image that is 1/2 the internal rendered size.

You can still do this manually in Fractal Architect by rendering to twice the desired size and by using a Photo or Image editor to reduce the final image to the desired size.



Open Source Fractal Architect OpenCL Rendering Engine

The Fractal Architect 3D OpenCL rendering engine kernels are Open Source and are licensed under GPLv3 just like Apophysis.
The kernel templates and the entire variation library source code is included in the Application bundle downloaded from the Mac App Store.
The actual OpenCL kernel source code used to build each variation set are found in the app's Application Support directory.

Being open source, it can be used by any open source flame fractal project as an alternate renderer. (Though it may take a bit of work to do.)
Other open source projects can embed the source code into their own projects and customize it as they wish.
My only request is that they call this alternate renderer the Fractal Architect Rendering Engine in their documentation and About window.
This is just a personal request - its not mandatory.

Being licensed under GPLv3, the license is Irrevocable which means I can't change my mind in the future. It is yours forever.

Later this year, I plan to create an Open Source project for a demonstration basic reference renderer that will run on
Windows, Mac, and Linux. It will be able to read Apophysis, Flam3, JWildfire, and Chaotica fractal files. It will render images to any size.
Since it will be based on the Fractal Architect OpenCL Rendering Engine, it will run on any OpenCL compliant GPU and CPU.
It will be the exact same rendering engine that the Fractal Architect 3D app uses.

Being a small working renderer, I hope the simple reference implementation will encourage other open source projects to adopt the rendering engine.

Andreas, you have created some exciting new ways to combine and layer fractals in JWildfire. I would like to work with you, if you wish, to get the FA alternate renderer fully capable of supporting your new innovations. I would love to see JWildfire crank out fractals on good hardware.

Viewers please look at the awesome images Andreas' innovations make possible: https://plus.google.com/communities/118391398023168606746


Fractal Architect 3D version 3.1.1

This render competition turned out to be a great assist to the FA rendering engine by exposing previously unknown render bugs.

We found 2 serious rendering issues in version 3.1.0, which is the must recent update on the Mac App Store:

1) There was a rendering artifact surrounding the central orange orb when rendering on the Nvidia GT 650M GPU.
    My son correctly diagnosed the problem as a Full Warp vs Half Warp granularity issue that allowed a race condition in the point pool.
    Fixed!! Thank you Steven.

2) The CPU renderer did not show the rendering artifact. Instead, the problem for CPU rendering only occurred when
 a fractal had both a Final Xform and one or more transparent  normal Xforms,  the transparent Xforms would be visible in the rendered image.
 (The GPU render did not have this problem.)
   Fixed!

The effect of these renderer changes on the ATI GPU families and Intel HD Iris GPUs has not been tested yet.
I will get this tested and released later this week. Of course, Apple has to take its testing & review whack at the app too before you can get
it from the Mac App Store. So in 10 days or so, you will have the renderer fixes in the upcoming update.



.

Find the Tiles Contest

When rendering on an old 2009 GPU with 256 Mb of GPU memory, you might find that you only have 60 Mb of video ram available.
(The 2012 Macbook Pro I have been using has 1024 Mb of GPU memory by the way.)

Time to tile !!

OK some people say tiles are bad and make for poor images.
I intend to disprove that and you will help me.

This 1600x1600 image has more than 1 tile.

Send an email to me by going to http://fractalarchitect.net and click on the Contact Me link at the bottom of the page.
In the email tell me how many render tiles were used to create this image.

The first 15 people that can tell me the correct number of tiles in this image will get a Mac App Store Promo code that will let you download
Fractal Architect 3D for free!

The contest closes on January 21, 2014 or after 15 people tell me the correct number of tiles - which ever occurs first.
The correct number of tiles and a histogram showing the number of entries for each tile count will be posted afterward.

Have fun!

Hi, I'm responding here, because I don't know what messaging-platform you use otherwise (and your site currently seems to be down), feel free to contact me per personal message or e-mail to discuss this further.

Regarding the discussion: very interesting, but I think too many topics inside of one thread. I would suggest to create a new category "Fractal Architect" and create one thread per topic.

Best regards,
Andreas

I'm trying to post some images, but I can't fit them within the allowed attachment size. I've rendered them to png. What do you prefer, change to a compressed format or lowering the size? Or maybe better to put them on another site and just link to them?

256 tiles  (I don't have a Mac so feel free to give my prize to whoever wants it  )

as a quick oppinion, the rendered image seems very blurry, which isn't good since one would want the lines to be sharp and contrasting with the blurry blobs. Wonder if you could render it with sharper AA.