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Raytracing and fractals

Here are a couple of nice pics which resulted from my playing around with fractal image programming, with the GIMP and with the raytracer POV-Ray. The fractal images were created in the full resolution and then downscaled for this web site using anti-aliasing. The raytracing pics were rendered anew in the desired resolution. Enjoy. (By the way, here is the POV-Ray source code for the mask on the side as a gzipped tar file.)

Another raytracing picture: A glass figure-eight knot and a brushed-steel dodecahedron frame float on a piece of wood on a glittery sea, surrounded by a burning horizon. Here are the POV-Ray source files and the brushed metal image map in a gzipped tar archive. The "brushed steel" look is from a theme of the window manager IceWM.

My first raytracing picture, consisting of a helecoid mirrored in a perfectly reflecting sphere. Here is a tar archive containing the two source files.

This is the fractal of Newton's method for solving exp(z)=1. The starting points for which the iteration diverges to infinity are plotted in black. The beautiful curved structure results from inverting the complex plane with respect to the unit circle. A maximum of 50 iterations were executed, and the conditions for aborting earlier were numerical overflow (divergence) and a modulus <0.5 (convergence to 0). You can download the full-sized 1392x1990 image, in gzipped PCX format.

The well-known Mandelbrot set, computed with unusual zeal: The original picture was computed ages ago on an 8 MHz Atari computer. It took several days to render and was large enough for a 140 by 120 cm poster in 180 dpi resolution. I have since repeated the calculation on a 600 MHz Pentium III in under a minute. For poster freaks (and paint program crash testers), here is the full-sized 9712x8634 image, again in gzipped PCX format (512 kB). Also available is the source code (Linux port, not Atari version ;)), documented in German.


TOS / Impressum