Smooth Shaded plugin

[kallisti]

Disclaimer: I am not a programmer or mathematician, so please excuse any apparent stupidity in the following.

Greetings. I am enjoying the Smooth Shaded and Partial/scallopped Iteration plugins a lot. They bring a new and more organic feel to classic 2d fractal motifs. IIRC, the effect is achieved by fooling FX into thinking there's 256 extra iteration bands between each "real" one.

This is well and good when adjusting still images, but causes problems when attempting to create zoom movies. It seems that the extra iteration bands "stretch" the color parameters in such a way as to never achieve "equilibrium", a state where color distribution appears similar in both shallow and deep zooms. I've found that the plug-in can be used with OK results for about 200 zooms. More than that, and I need to choose which part of the zoom movie I wish to fall within the "good" limits.

So now I wonder, would it be possible to make a version of the plugin that will not "stretch" speed/accelleration over distance? (By adding more or less bands to the existing ones, modifying the range of the Speed/Acc sliders, etc?) I think the Smooth Shaded effect could be a huge benefit to many zoom locations.

Kind regards,
kallisti

[panzerboy]

Sorry Kallisti, your post escaped me somehow.
I totally agree that the smooth shading is less than ideal for zoom movies.
Altering the speed or acceleration on the fly is not possible, there is just no function/method provided to do that.
I would like to create a dialog to alter the number of fake iterations.
64 iterations would give acceptable smoothing for video but also allow reduced acceleration.
At the moment you have to specify large accelaration parameter, and that stops and synchonised colour effects.

Alas I have never been able to get a settings dialog to work.
I need to do some more research.
I think I saw some stuff on code project that said I needed to use different dialog functions from a dll.

[kallisti]

No worries, yours escaped me as well. I guess this isn't the most active subforum.

Aye, reducing the number of extra iteration bands by 50% should help, and in most instances it will probably noy even be noticeable. If such a plugin is released at some point, I will be grateful.

On a different, yet Smooth Shaded related note: Is there any way to calculate the correct parameter settings for the Smooth Shaded plugin based on the iteration and color mapping values of the original version? My limited logic tells me it is, but I have no idea how to go about it or if it's even feasible. I have to ask, though, because if it's possible to set up some formulas in Excel, it would be extremely helpful in my pursuits.