gwyfract

gwyfract is a simple Mandelbrot set outside renderer. It uses Gwyddion libraries for false color 2D data display, selections and some infrastructure. Despite being a toy renderer, it has a few cool features:

• smooth true-color set outside visualization based on renormalized inifinity limit (the math)
• deep zoom, using GNU MP library for arbitrary precision math
• multithreaded, with the number of calculation threads automatically adjusted to the number of available processor cores
• false colours based on your favourite Gwyddion palettes
• image ehnancement via “unfair antialiasing”
• several iteration count to false colour mapping modes, including Gwyddion's adaptive mapping

See README in the tarballs for some usage notes.

Compilation requirements

• Linux/Unix system⁽¹⁾ (tested on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD)
• Gwyddion 2.5 or newer, including development files
• GThread 2.x (i.e. GLib with thread support enabled)
• GNU MP arbitrary precision library, including development files

⁽¹⁾ I don't know how to detect the number of processors on MS Windows and namely it's bloody too hard to use third-party libraries (GNU MP) there. Feel free to prove me wrong though. (Yeti)

Screenshot of gwyfract showing the control window and the rendering window with mild deep zoom (precision just slightly above what the machine long double provides).

Comparison of traditional discrete iteration count rendering and smooth rendering.

Comparison of a normal pixel-for-pixel with image enhanced with “unfair antialiasing”.

Comparison of several mapping types (linear, sqrt-log and adaptive) on a Mandelbrot set detail.