hpdz.net

Canyon Deep Trial 1

Trial run for a deep-zoom into the Canyon region of the Mandelbrot set

This project was a trial of an extreme deep-zoom animation into the "canyon" region of the Mandelbrot set. That's the area between the main cardioid shape and the first bulb on the left, at (x,y) = (-0.75, 0). It was rendered around Feb 2009.

This area is a major computational challenge because the vast majority of the pixels are in-set pixels as you dive into the canyon, and the number of iterations required to see anything goes up extremely fast.

Visit the UVFP site for a couple of longer, deeper videos. Scroll down to "Where no man has gone before" and "Descent".

Canyon1 and Canyon2 are two related larger videos that zoom to greater mangifications, but not as deeply into the crevice of the canyon.

The little 160x120 test video here zooms to a final size of 4.9757e-20 in 600 frames. The frame rate is only 10 fps, so they are 1 minute long. The iteration count limit is 100,000,000, which severely restricts fractional count generation since this is only about a factor of 21 below the maximum value expressible in a 32-bit signed integer.

This project was rendered with frame interpolation, but at a time before that subsystem was generated good log files of what it was doing, so I am not sure of the specific details of how many primary images were used or how big they were.

This is a 500x500 image of the final frame. It took 63 hours to render in 2008, probably on Core2 system. On the 980X system, the estimate (based on sampling and extrapolating) is about 24 hours. No noise reduction oversampling was used -- 63 hours is long enough for a little image like this!!! -- and you can see how noisy this is.

Below are some frame captures from the animation.

Note that the video files are 320x240, but the original rendered fractal data files are only 160x120. This is one of the rare times where it seemed reasonable to me to publish a video file in an up-scaled resolution from the original data. This is, after all, just a test run, not a real production video, and you would just have to set the player to magnify it to see anything.