JWildfire 2.56 release: improved render-quality

Just released JWildfire V2.56.

This version comes with the following major new features:

  • improved render quality: spatial oversampling and a few of other option to significantly improve render-quality (see the official Wiki for details: http://wiki.jwildfire.org/index.php?title=Manual_RenderQualityFlameFractals)
  • visualisation of filter-kernels to make it more transparent how filtering works and how different settings work
  • reduced memory-usage (needs about 50% of memory with identical settings as before)
  • simplified install: no more installer, just unzip, additional package for Windows 64 Bit with pre-installed Java and Leap-motion-dll’s

Complete list of changes:

  •  new spatial-oversampling-option for improved render-quality. The default value is 2, this may be set in the Preferences
  • visualisation of filter-kernels for better understanding/easier customizing of the spatial filtering process, both a nice-looking 3d-mode and a fast 2d-mode are available
  • new sample-jittering- and color-oversampling-option for improved render-quality. The default value is off, this may be set in the Preferences.
  • new post-noise-filtering-option for redusing noise of the final noise by using an adaptive gaussian filter. The default value is off, this may be set in the Preferences.
  • added a brief description of all of this options in the official Wiki: http://wiki.jwildfire.org/index.php?title=Manual_RenderQualityFlameFractals
  • changed the memory management/layout of the iteration buffer (rendering should now take significantly less memory, and initialisation of rendering runs substantly faster, comes to a cost of only slightly degraded render time)
  • the final image-generating-process now works fully multi-threaded and should be faster
  • added a new experimental option “Opacity” to control the opacity of the foreground when rendering an image with background (often those renders caused the loss of too many details)
  • new “Pseudo3D”-random-flame-generator
  • improved the “Xenomorph”-random-flame-generator
  •  improved the “Cross”-random-flame-generator
  • some more useful statistics in the interactive renderer, e.g. absolute render-speed-indicator to make it easier to compare different settings (render speed means the quality level the renderer can reach in one hour)
  • the windows-launcher (JWildfire.exe) should now be much smarter to find a valid Java-install
  • completely removed the izpack-installer (until now there were always two files: a *.zip for users who just wanted to unzip, or an izpack-based installer which caused too many problems)
  • there are now two packages available: platform-independant without jdk and any dll’s, and windows64 with jdk and certain dll’s
    – removed the applet from the distribution
  • the Chaotica-integration is now disabled by default (in order to hide the export-button which may occupy important space for some users)
  • changed the animation-playback in the main-editor to full-window-size
  • made the detached renderer and the interactive renderer to behave more smooth
  • progressbar-update should be much smoother now, i.e. use less ressources
  • negative “perspective”-values are allowed now (again)
  • when using post-symmetry, the maximum of symmetry-order of point-symmetry was increased from 18 to 36
  • new ouputchannel to change param-values of plugins via the Leap Motion controller
  • added a new option tinaIntegrationChaoticaAnimationExport to the preferences. This option controls if the flames which are exchanged over the Chaotica-bridge are animated flames or static flames. In case you export them as static flames and have not a Studio licence for Chaotica you may render in higher resolutions.
  • fixed a bug in the crop-like variations
  • fixed a bug regarding autoimatically saving the current flame in the iteractive renderer
  • some refactoring of the structure synthesizer
  • completely removed all experimental opencl-code

Just click the “Random flames” button to start playing around and have fun 🙂