• MB3D 1.90 RELEASE

    Posted on by thargor6

    Hi,
    I wish you a Merry Christmas and a nice holiday! I was absent for a longer time from JWildfire-development because I
    was very busy with creating the new MB3D-release, which now was released at fractalforums.com.

    V1.90 RELEASE NOTES:
    – Support for animated (height)maps! They are defined in the “Map Sequences”-window in the Prefs-section
    and saved as local properties, i.e. you may use them independly of a specific set of fractal params.
    – You define an image sequence by filename, start frame, end frame, loop setting and frame increment
    – You assign this sequence to a logical map channel (any number) you wish
    – You use this channel as map number in your fractal, e.g. as color map or heightmap
    – Now you can preview the state at frame [n] by changing the frame number in the main view
    (this is just for test render, not for animating)
    – When you use this fractal in the animation window, the map will now be animated, i.e. at each frame
    of the animation the corresponding frame of the map will be calculated (accordingly to the settings
    you made) and the image-file will be loaded. If no image file is found it is asumed to be “black”.

    – new MutaGen-module to easily explore new combinations of formulas and settings
    – four types of mutations:
    – add, remove, exchange formulas
    – modify params of formulas
    – modify Julia-mode
    – modify iteration count
    – in the UI you may turn on/off those types individually, by specifying a weight, and you may specify an additional
    strength-parameter
    – you may browse through the already generated generations of mutations and restart on interesting results
    – you may resize the window to alter the size of the generated thumbnail images
    – you may cancel/restart the mutation-process at any time (sometimes there occur combinations of parameters
    which may lead to “endless” calculations, in such cases it is helpful to be able to just restart)
    – WARNING: some formula-combinations may SILENTLY crash the program, so please save often!
    Silently crashing means you will not see it immediately, often the UI starts to behave weird.
    We are working to improve this!
    – This is just the first version, e.g. interpolated functions are not supported yet!
    – Please note, that it is intented that this module does not create ready-to-use artworks from scratch.
    It can only happen, when you put in well made parameters (whith everything what makes a great artwork),
    that the mutation will keep many of those properties, making it a nice artwork.
    Or in short: the better your input, the better the output.

    – Navigator-size may now be altered (you must expand the right toolbar to see the “Navigator size” control),
    the last setting is stored to the ini-file. Please note, that the size can only be defined in percent
    by using the arrows or listbox, but not by changing the window-size directly (this is due to some historic
    implementation details).

    – Global rework of the UI, added theme-support, made “Glossy” the default theme,
    changed the captions of some buttons in order to make them more readable

    – Formula-Window:
    – exchanging of formulas now works in two directions

    – integrated formula-editor for creating/editing JIT-compiled formulas (see the new buttons in the formula window)
    – support for MB3D’s parameters and constants, both the TIteration3D and TIteration3Dext-structs are supported
    – preprocessor to deal with the parameter-handling code
    – backed by the commercial PaxCompiler
    – included support for about 50 mathematical functions
    – watch out for formulas with the prefix “JIT” for examples!
    – Please note that dIFS-formulas are not supported yet because they are invoked differently,
    but also this will be fixed in future releases

    – Many new formulas from the community at fractalforums.com

    – New Info-Section at the main window, which now has a button to reach the official bug-reporting tool,
    please use the bug-reporting-tool to report bugs if possible!

    The Download is hosted at the place, where this software was invented: fractalforums.com

     

    Best regards and have fun!

    Andreas

     


    📂This entry was posted in MB3D releases

  • JWildfire 2.60 release: the HUGE update :-)

    Posted on by thargor6

    Just released JWildfire V2.60, which is a really HUGE update. This time, it took 7 BETA-versions until completion, thanks to the guys at the forums for suggestions and testing :-).

    Here are the update-notes, please read them carefully 🙂

    Major changes:

    • New progressive preview, which allows progressive rendering while editing.
      While it needs much CPU-power it is a great new way to explore interesting spots inside your fractals, it is especially of great use in combination with the “Fine Edit”-option.
      It also allows you browse random-flames or flames generated by scripts at higher quality because the quality increases while you are watching at the fractal.
    • Any variation may be now be easily toggled to be pre_/normal/post_ – variation. This feature uses minimal changes in the user-interface and it does not break anything, e. g. all scripts should be remain intact without any further change
    • Separate (and resizable) window for editing scripts with a more advanced editor with basic syntax-highlighting
    • Some new random-generators, including the “Spirals3D”-generator which generates cool 3D-flames (i. e. flames with affine3D-transforms, not just the usual z-translation-stuff)

    Complete list of changes:

    • New progressive preview, which allows progressive rendering while editing.
      While it needs much CPU-power it is a great new way to explore interesting spots inside your fractals, it is especially of great use in combination
      with the “Fine Edit”-option.
      It also allows you browse random-flames or flames generated by scripts at higher quality because the quality increases while you are watching at
      the fractal.There is a new button to toggle progressive-preview in the main-editor (you may switch between classic preview and progressive preview at any time),
      and there is a new option in the Preferences to specify the initial state of this button (tinaEditorProgressivePreview).
      So, if you machine is too slow, you may just permanently disable it and use the default preview which was also slightly improved.There are new options tinaEditorProgressivePreviewMaxRenderTime and tinaEditorProgressivePreviewMaxRenderQuality in the Preferences to control the render-time of progressive preview.
    • any variation may be now be easily toggled to be pre_/normal/post_ – variation. This feature uses minimal changes in the user-interface
      and it will not break anything, e. g. all scripts should be remain intact without any further change
    • added the possiblity to change the position of variations inside a transform
    • New “Low priority”-option in the the launcher. This options is only available under Windows and enabled by default. It should cause a general smoother behaviour of the software.
    • providing a more advanced editor with basic syntax-highlighting for editing scripts and custom variations (thanks CozyG for the java8-related fix)
    • separate (and resizable) window for editing scripts
    • new “Batch Renderer”-button which quicksaves the current flame and sends it together with size/quality information to the batch-renderer
    • new “post_axis_symmetry_wf”-variation
    • new “post_point_symmetry_wf”-variation
    • new “mobius_strip” by CozyG
    • removed the confusing “H”-Button from the main-editor in order to free space, cleaned up the main toolbar
    • adjustment to brightness-calculation when using post-symmetry
    • rearranged some buttons so that it is unlikely to press the MutaGen-button by wanting to press Undo (important because the MutaGen currently can not cancelled)
    • new “Reset”- and “Reset All”-buttons on the Xaos-tab
    • Optimization of preview-rendering: do not re-render flame after switching “triangles”
    • Optimization of preview-rendering: do not re-render flame after switching editor modes
    • new “Spirals”-random-flame-generator which can generate awesome results, thanks Tate27kh from dA for the inspiration!
    • new “Ghosts”-random-flame-generator
    • new “Spirals3D”-random-flame-generator (which utilizes the “Spirals”-generator)
    • improved the “Brokat”-random-flame-generator (uses the ability to switch variation-types, see below)
    • improved the “Simple Tiling”-random-flame-generator
    • reimplemented the “Brokat3D”-random-flame-generator to generate more visually appealing results
    • reimplemented the “Gnarl3D”-random-flame-generator to generate more visually appealing results
    • new Option “tinaAdvancedCodeEditor” in the Prefs to turn off the advanced code-editor. May not work on all systems/may not look good on all themes, especially the true dark ones.
    • the Script-From-Flame-Generator also supports flames with 3D-affine transforms
    • the Script-From-Flame-Generator also respects the new variation-priority
    • created a v6 of the Custom_Variation_Loader_GH-script by CozyG, which now used the new Prefs-option for the path and included this version as standard script
    • new property tinaCustomVariationsPath in the Prefs to specify the path for external custom_variations (used by the Custom_Variation_Loader_GH script by CozyG).
    • modifications to ScriptParamsDialog and ScriptParamsForm to keep script params modal dialog centered on JWildfire main frame.
    • added use of tinaAdvancedCodeEditorFontSize and tinaAdvancedCodeEditorColorFix to ResourceDialog.
    • performance-improvement of the MutaGen
    • fixed some zoom-calculation-bug when zooming with the mouse-wheel
    • fixed some problem with parameter-handling in the “trade”-variation
    • moved the gradient-editor-button to the gradient-tab
    • removed the outdated start_windows.bat from the distribution (Windows-users should use JWildfire.exe instead to properly start the application)
    • updated the Win64-distribution to java8

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


    📂This entry was posted in JWildfire JWildfire releases

  • Finally… :-)

    Posted on by thargor6

    … I found the new option: the most recent comments in this blog are now displayed at top (like in every other blog, lol). Did not notice when this option was introduced in WordPress, but it was not always there, but anyhow, I like it 🙂


    📂This entry was posted in JWildfire