hpdz.net

High-Precision Deep Zoom

External Links

General Information on Fractals and the Mandelbrot Set

A site featuring fractal animations by various artists.	FractalMovies.com
A small forum discussing fractals. HPDZ.NET was recently nominated "Fractal Website of the Month" on this forum, so I should at least put a link there, no?	Fractal Forums
This is one of the most comprehensive resources for anything you want to know about the Mandelbrot set and fractals in general. Tons of information and links to other resources. Also a great gallery of what the real fractal artists are doing.	Fractalus.com
If you thought this was a calm, benign field, think again. Relocated to its own domain after bogus DMCA complaints, this blog offers a completely, totally different perspective on fractal art by commentators who are clearly not afraid to speak their mind. Like it or not, this blog advocates (somewhat viciously at times) for the continued progression of the art and shows no mercy.	orbittrap.ca
I would love to spend 6 months writing a comprehensive dissertation on the Mandelbrot set, but unfortunately, I don't have the time. Fortunately, however, it's already been done. Some parts are highly technical and some are incomplete, but still a good reference.	Mu-Encyclopedia
Here you will find a a very mathematical discussion of the set, along with some nice Java applets illustrating various technical points. There are a few cool animations here too, especially one showing the relationship between points on the M-set and the corresponding Julia set.	The Mandelbrot and Julia Sets Anatomy
Although dominated by Poser babes, this is still a great collection of digital art in general, and with a very nice fractal art section. Galleries here cover a huge gamut of styles, including may I would consider not really strictly "fractal art" but rather "art using fractals" but still a great site to visit.	Renderosity

Of course you can always check out Wikipedia ("mandelbrot" or "fractal"), but I think their explanations are a bit terse and assume you already know a fair amount of math.

Miscellaneous Useful Tools

EasyBCD: This little utility saved my life when I accidentally messed up my boot partition by repairing my Windows XP installation.	neosmart.net
TABRIFFDUMP: This is a handy command-line utility for listing chunks in AVI files and other RIFF-based media container files. My program generates animations as uncompressed BMP images contained in an AVI file, so I have needed this tool for debugging several times.	t@b software
MediaInfo: Displays detailed multimedia file information, including what type of codec they are encoded with. This is very helpful for viewing my raw AVI files as well as the MP4 and WMV formats that are published to the site.	mediainfo.sourceforge.net
Gspot Codec Information Appliance: A handy tool for inspecting information in a multimedia file. Displays exactly what types of codec a file uses, bit rates of all streams, etc.	www.headbands.com/gspot
PE Explorer: Utility for browsing the contents of Portable Executable (PE) format EXE files. Works with 64-bit files. Displays data in a tree-structured format similar to what regedit looks like. Also shows graphical views of resources like dialog boxes and images. This enabled me to solve my mysterious 0xC000007B "Bad Image" problem by letting me see in detail the contents of my 64-bit EXE file.	www.sibnature.com
PE Structure Viewer: Another EXE file browser. Very nice, but not ready for 64-bit EXE files yet (as of March 2010).	www.heaventools.com
Visual Studio: What can I say? Love it or hate it, this is what the whole project is based on. The fractal software is an MFC multi-document application in C++ and assembly language.	msdn.microsoft.com

Fractal Rendering Software

UltraFractal: Probably the most sophisticated fractal drawing software out there...although surely not the fastest....	www.ultrafractal.com
Fractint: I believe this was the first high-precision fractal rendering software produced. Not capable of animation directly but can read script files. Still runs in DOS. One of the fastest high-precision fractal rendering tools available, but very old-school core arithmetic functions limit its speed on modern systems.	FractInt
ChaosPro is another rmajor program used extensively by fractal artists. This was used to create the "Amazing Mandelbrot Set" video, which is a collection of about 20 nice but not-so-deep animations of the set.	www.chaospro.de

My own software is not available for distribution. It's too dedicated to animations, too hard to use, and still a bit buggy since I don't put a whole lot of time into maintaining it. It is also completely undocumented.

Other Fractal Animation and Art Web Sites

There are way too many sites and YouTube channels and Vimeo users making fractal art for me to try to keep a comprehensive list of them all. This short list is some of my favorites, or shows works that have had some influence or provided some inspiration or support.

And I hate to say that I simply do not have time right now to explore the spectacular work being done on 3D fractals, like the mandelbulb and mandelbox. Maybe I can start working on this in late 2010, but for now I just have to be a spectator, sadly, as this incredible field develops.

The Ultimate Fractal Video Project. Home of the "Universe" animations. Lots of cool animation here drawn with FractInt. Run by a hard-core purist, generating high-quality images with no shortcuts.	www.fractal-animation.net
A collection of mostly embedded YouTube and Vimeo animations that the webmaster feels are "The Best Fractal Animations on the Internet - Period." I will not argue with that since the YouTube version of QBIX is linked there! Also has several TeamFresh videos and numerous links to some spectacular 3D mandelbulb and mandelbox animations.	www.fractalanimations.com
ArtMatrix Run by Homer Smith and Jane Staller, this site has a nice gallery of still images and a very long list of fractal-related links. No animations are on the site, but a DVD is available for purchase. Some philosophizing is also there.	www.artmatrix.com
A collection of significant animations of various styles, including quite a few high-definition animations. Also has links to some fractal DVDs and resources on fractals in general. Maintained by Eric Bigas.	www.fractalanimation.com
The TeamFresh website has brilliant HD fractal animations to sizes deeper than E200 with some great combinations of shapes (although a preponderance of pink in the colorizing). 3D animations too. Nicely done site with slick Flash effects.	www.hd-fractals.com
Jock Cooper's site featuring a large gallery of still images of various fractals and a gallery of great animations.	www.fractal-recursions.com
This is the site of Eric Baird, who has written a book on relativity. His site also has a good amount of fractal art and animations, and he has a YouTube channel worth checking out as well (ErkDemon).	www.relativitybook.com
Bill Boll's site for his nice DVD featuring about 20 modestly deep zooms (only to E-17 or so) into various locations on the Mandelbrot set, created with ChaosPro. Nothing nearly as deep as what you will see here or at UFVP, but nicely done nevertheless. Some evidence of serious frame interpolation is very clear, so much so that it is better characterized as just digital zooming into a still image rather than a deep zoom animation. Nevertheless, it works well and actually smoothes out some of the speckle aliasing you see when drawing raw data frame-by-frame. The DVD also includes a short and quite clear explanation by a mathematician of how the Mandelbrot set is constructed.	www.mandelbrotset.net
This site actually has NOTHING to do with fractals, and is actually just a storefront for a design consulting firm, but it's a lot of fun to play with it.	www.zerofractal.com

Music

I love the music of Technetium and plan to feature it in more videos, but just the best of the best. I don't want to waste this great music on a mediocre animation.

Technetium Music

Video and Audio Software

Most of the software I use for encoding the AVI files my program generates, and also mixing the music with the videos, comes from Sony. I currently use Vegas Pro 8 and Acid Pro 6.

I also use Cinescore to generate music for the videos. The library is not as extensive as the SonicFire library, but they have some music that works better with the fractal animations.

Unfortunately, Sony discontinued Cinescore in December 2009.

www.sonycreativesoftware.com

I use SonicFire Pro 5 by SmartSound to generate music. They have a more extensive music library than Sony's Cinescore, but the music doesn't work as well for fractal video accompaniment. Also, the SonicFire software doesn't integrate with Vegas, so it is a bit of a hassle for me to use it for this application.