Bump mapping & improved histogram coloring - v1.3.10 is available

[Botond Kósa]

A new version of Mandel Machine is available.

The major new feature is bump mapping. It allows fake-3D visualization of subtle details previously hidden by the slow gradients in the palette.
Bump mapping is controlled by 3 parameters:

• Direction of lighting (in degrees): specifies the angle of the simulated lighting. Surfaces facing the light are highlighted, the ones blocked from lighting are darkened.
• Depth: controls how much the structures emerge from the background of slow gradients. Shallow depth causes a relief/emboss-like look. Greater depth values result in deeper valleys between structures (see the examples below).
• Strength: controls the amount of color shift caused by highlights and shadows.

The parameters are continuously adjustable to give instant feedback.

Reference image without bump mapping:


Bump mapping with low depth and low strength:


Bump mapping with low depth and high strength:


Bump mapping with great depth and low strength:


Bump mapping with great depth and high strength:

[Botond Kósa]

Histogram coloring is also improved in v1.3.10. The palette is no longer wrapped around, allowing for palettes with different starting and ending colors (like the classic one used in phaumann's videos). The color density controls the nonlinearity of the palette at the higher end. Color densities below 0 cause the pixels with the highest iteration counts to stand out:

Example image with histogram coloring using phaumann's palette, color density = 0:


Same image with color density = -100:


Same image with color density = -200:


Same image with color density = -300:

[istinn]

this hillshading light effect is very nice, great idea

i would also like to see a working pan solution if possible! right mouse click has the pan but there is no screen refresh, as far as I can understand there has to be a way to continue the image from there and fill only the new area that enters the frame without refreshing the whole fractal frame again. this will be useful for frame definition and exploring a specific zoom scale...

I do not know for sure but i guess pan could also use some specific cache solution, as every pan movement adds calculations to the same "very high resolution" image and returns to the same area are very possible. I think for pan, a specific area around the screen that can be cached and pre-defined in megapixels


but even a brutal refresh pan is useful!

[cKleinhuis]

if you want to be cool like frax app, be sure to implement a realtime adjustment for the light angle

in fact this can be extended to behave similar to frax, like light intensity, angle, color and so on unsure if you have yet implemented layering, but layerings work well with that as well, but for layerings some kind of transparency handling is a must

just my five cents to keep you going

[Botond Kósa]

if you want to be cool like frax app, be sure to implement a realtime adjustment for the light angle

Direction of light under Rendering / Post processing does just that You can get realtime feedback by dragging the slider.

in fact this can be extended to behave similar to frax, like light intensity, angle, color and so on unsure if you have yet implemented layering, but layerings work well with that as well, but for layerings some kind of transparency handling is a must

Yeah... layering with transparency would be nice. Someday, maybe.

[Kalles Fraktaler]

Your "bump" mappings is really nice, the arbitrary angle is awesome and it compensates a bit for different resolutions.
However, unfortunately it also has the limitation that the result is dependent of the zoom level.
I wonder if it is possible at all to avoid it, and make arbitrary deep zoom movies with this effect active?

[Botond Kósa]

Your "bump" mappings is really nice, the arbitrary angle is awesome and it compensates a bit for different resolutions.

Did you find an example where the compensation for different resolutions is not perfect? It was designed to provide the same shadings, no matter what resolution or supersampling is chosen. (Technically, the slopes are normalized with image width.)

However, unfortunately it also has the limitation that the result is dependent of the zoom level.
I wonder if it is possible at all to avoid it, and make arbitrary deep zoom movies with this effect active?

MM calculates the slopes based on the 2-dimensional derivative of iteration count. By zooming in 1 step, the distance of the pixels doubles, hence the derivative halves. I think this is OK for zoom movies as long as the bump mapping is performed for each frame independently, not just for the key frames. This will make movie rendering a bit slower though, since all key frame scaling would have to be performed on iteration values, not color values. But this will also be necessary for the histogram coloring of movies. KFR Movie Maker already works this way, right?

[istinn]

crash log files for version 1.3.10 crash on restoring last position, had to rename history folder to start again

[Botond Kósa]

crash log files for version 1.3.10 crash on restoring last position, had to rename history folder to start again

From the log files it seems you had very little free memory, around 370 MB. Trying to restore a moderately large image (~30 megapixels) could result in an out of memory error.

A warning will be shown in such cases with the option to quit the application.

[istinn]

thanks, good to know
one more finding, sometimes the new bump mapping just fills the half of the screen, recompute does not fill it, changing zoom value slightly or color offset completes it ok.

[Botond Kósa]

A small update is available, with up to 2x faster bump mapping when adjusting the light angle / depth / strength sliders. The speedup is achieved by caching the normal vectors for each pixel of the image. The cache consumes 12 bytes of RAM per pixel, effectively doubling the RAM consumption of the image. Caching can be switched off to enable processing of very large images.

[ellarien]

Thank you for all the recent improvements and features! I may be falling in love with the good old Mandelbrot set all over again. 

Would it be possible to have the movie maker break the movie down into manageable (<2Gb, I guess) chunks? I made a 4Gb movie, but my computer couldn't play it.

[Chillheimer]

Would it be possible to have the movie maker break the movie down into manageable (<2Gb, I guess) chunks? I made a 4Gb movie, but my computer couldn't play it.

did I miss something? since when can you make movies with mandel machine?
If so - how/where?!

[Botond Kósa]

did I miss something? since when can you make movies with mandel machine?
If so - how/where?!

I've been working on MM movie maker for months now. It was unintentionally included in version 1.3.5 and SeryZone started using it, so I left it in the public release but did not make an announcement. It can be found at the very bottom of the tool bar, look for a toolbox called Animation. It still needs some refinements here and there to be easily usable, but anyway, here's a short tutorial on how to use it:

1. Set the Starting and ending location of your animation by navigating to the desired location and clicking the left/right thumbnail in the Animation toolbox. The ending location must have a zoom depth greater than the starting location, so zoom-out animations are not possible currently. You can also specify the zoom step between key frames, but anything different from the default value of 1 is untested.
2. Click on the Compute key frames button and specify a filename to save the animation definition (.mma file). You should create the file in an empty folder. After saving the starting and ending location in the mma file, the key frames will be computed and saved automatically in the same folder. This process could take a long time, so be patient.
3. You can check the saved key frames by opening their .mmf files from the folder. If you see glitches on a key frame, it can be recomputed and saved manually with altered parameters (e.g. Use lower scale data types turned off).
4. When all the key frames are correct, it's time to render the animation! Set the rendering parameters in the Rendering toolbox and the animation parameters in the Step 2 - Render animation part of the Animation toolbox. You have to set the total frames in the movie and the framerate (fps), and the duration will be computed based on them. You can also specify the length and color of the fade-in and fade-out effects. The max zoom rate and zoom acceleration are calculated based on the duration and the zoom depth difference of the starting and ending locations. You can also add a motion blur effect by setting a value greater than 1 in the Motion blur (temporal AA) field. Output supersampling, Key frame supersampling an Temporal blending can be used to improve the quality of the video at the cost of longer rendering times. I will describe these parameters later.
5. Click the Render animation button and then select the previously saved .mma file. Then you have to specify an output format and file name. Currently the following formats are supported:

• Uncompressed AVI: lossless, only sizes under 4GB are supported
• PNG sequence: lossless, ~30% size reduction compared to AVI
• JPG sequence: lossy, ~80% size reduction compared to AVI

Have a good fun!

[ellarien]

I've been working on MM movie maker for months now. It was unintentionally included in version 1.3.5

Ah, I see. I wasn't sure whether it was officially supposed to work or not, so I was pleasantly surprised that it mostly does. I love the acceleration/deceleration effects at the beginning and end.

the following formats are supported:

• Uncompressed AVI: losless, only sizes under 4GB are supported
• PNG sequence: lossless, ~30% size reduction compared to AVI
• JPG sequence: lossy, ~80% size reduction compared to AVI

Have a good fun!

That's good to know -- I hadn't realized there were formats other than AVI available. Thanks!