Greetings, all,
My name's Phil, and I've posted a couple of times, but haven't ever gotten to the whole introduction thing. I guess I'm more of a dive into conversation rather than a "Hi, my name is" kind of guy, but it might be time to learn some social skills.
I've been entranced by the beauty, science and math of the Mandelbrot set since ~1990 (when did Mandelblitz come out?) and loved using the aforementioned Mandelblitz, as well as TurboMandel to produce some really beautiful things. I actually did my high school science fair project on the calculation of image size based on zoom depth. I'm not sure people knew what to do with it, but I created the images in MandelMountains, which is a program I have yet to see really created for any system other than the Amiga. Anyone know of a similar program out there?
At any rate, fast forward to now, and I spend the majority of my time running MandelBulber and MDZ natively under linux while running Mandlebulb3D and UltraFractal5 under Wine. I am so impressed with how far the technology has come since I started and have fallen in love all over again. I've started working on several series of still-image zoom sequences in MDZ and UF (the animation codecs in UF seem to have issues with Wine and don't produce actual animations, just 5-hour renders and 0-byte files...) and animations in Mandelbulb3D, which I like a lot. I have yet to be able to do anything, animation-wise, with MandelBulber, and I think it's just user-error and not having messed with it enough. In the interest of equal time, I *have* produced some beautiful (at least, to me) images with GnoFract4D, but get frustrated with it's lack of deep zooming ability. Ah, well...
That's about it, really. I don't really consider myself a fractal "artist," but rather an artist (I write for/play guitar, draw and am a photographer) who loves the chaos and beauty of unadulterated *math.*
Two examples of anims follow, including my first anim in which I blorked the tween-frame count so it zooms quite a bit faster than I intended and, at full screen, tends to give me a bit of vertigo...
Peace,
Phil
http://www.youtube.com/v/hZUI5Rhez-0&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1
http://www.youtube.com/v/LMNxsdHh_U8&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1