HPDZ.NET News

What's New - Some Pre-Releases

We took a break from the newsletter in December. Mostly what's been going on is draft work on a couple of new animations that are not finished yet. There was also some work on fixing a few small bugs in the motion system.

Qbix - A Cubic Mandelbrot Set Deep Zoom

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In November, we began a project to create a deep zoom in the cubic Mandelbrot set to at least 1e-30 using the new, more sophisticated frame interpolation system that has been in development for a long time.

A small first draft of this has been made, and its final frame size is 5.9e-33. The plan is to make this at 1280x720 or something like that.

It took 95 hours to render the 166 master images that were interpolated produce the final 1000 frames at 320x180 pixels.

HyperNova

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This is a new fractal formula that I don't think has ever been used before. It is based on the Nova fractal formula but uses a more complicated polynomial than what is usually used.

There's a huge amount of beautiful structure here, and I have set it up so that two complex numbers control the shape of the fractal. That gives a lot of freedom to explore different variations. The video published here is just a small taste of what this formula can do. Both morphing and deep-zooming give really good results with this formula, and much more will be coming from this.

A tiny clip using the HyperNova fractal appeared in a test video I made a couple of years ago for people having trouble downloading video files. I also made a banner image for FractalForums.com using this formula.

PanTest2-HD

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PanTest2 was a small project I made long ago for testing out the first incarnation of the panning/zooming component of the fractal animation software. The motion software has been revised a few times, and in November I found a bug in it when used in combination with the frame interpolation system. This little clip was just a test run I made to show that the bug is fixed, but it looks nice enough to be worth putting up on the site alongside the older version.

The motion in this version is much more complicated than in the earlier version.

This video also demonstrates some true high-definition video. Its resolution is 1280x720 and it is encoded at 20 Mbps for nearly perfect detail.

The colors are nice and the HD quality is impressive, but, this particular video is really just a technical exercise, not particularly artistic.

Future work

By far, the most important pending project in the software is implementing full floating-point arithmetic using my ultra-fast multiplication core code. Currently, for high-precision deep zooms, the arithmetic is all done with fixed-point numbers. This works well for divergent fractals like the basic Mandelbrot set, where the numbers involved in the calculation either remain rather small or else diverge in a way that does not require very large numbers to be represented. Convergent fractals, like HyperNova and many others, including my Secant fractals, can require both very small numbers and very large numbers as the iterations proceed, and fixed-point arithmetic is not well-suited to this situation. Making a full floating-point arithmetic system is something I have wanted to do for a long time, but it is now rising to the top of the list of large projects. This is a truly large project and is not likely to have much progress until after Q4 of 2010.