Help Incendia | Multiprocessor Fractal Engine

This is INCENDIA main panel.



The elements are:

The Fractal Selector Control



Here you can select the fractal itself by clicking on the fractal name. Use the slider or the arrows in this control to move around the list of fractals. Once you select the fractal, a set of random parameters are assigned to the fractal, so it can appears in the view windows.


Information Panels



These panels can give brief information about the selected fractal.
In the case of the top panel, the information is:

* The Fractal Name.
* Number of transformation used.
* Number of base shapes used.
* The selected resolution for the rendering.


The Load and Save Parameters Buttons



These buttons saves and loads a text file on there is defined the entire program parameters used in a given moment. The file extension used is “.par”.
The content of the buffers aren’t saved with these buttons.


The Load and Save Buffers Buttons



These two buttons saves all of the program parameters and buffers in a given moment.

The resolution used on the program defines the size of the resultant file. Mind that if you plan to save a big (8192×8192, for example) resolution fractal.

The file extension used is “.zb” and the content of the file is binary.


The New Fractal Button



Once you have selected a fractal type, you can play dice with the fractal parameters with this button. This produces a new fractal every time. Since the parameters are randomly (but not completely random, there are some rules that controls the shape of the fractal) selected, the previous one is completely erased.


The Preview and Draw Buttons



These two buttons are mainly used for alternating between the actual fractal iterations (white points) and a fast preview of the fractal (shaded and textured).

Also, they can be used to lock and unlock the trackball controls of the camera and the zoom slider. When rendering, use the Preview button to see how the fractal develops.


Mouse Controls and the Preview Windows



If you have selected the Draw Button, you can control the fractal with the mouse:

The Left Mouse Button controls the trackball rotation (you can restrict the trackball rotation axis with the rotation control).

The Right Mouse Button controls the panning around the fractal (this can be restricted to an specific axe, using the position control).

The Mouse Wheel controls the zoom factor. (if you don’t have a mouse wheel, you can use the zoom slider)

Once you get an interesting view, you can press the Preview Button:



If you dont like the image, just use again the mouse controls.
Note: This only works while the program isn’t rendering a fractal.


The Render, Stop and Continue Buttons



These buttons starts, stops and continue the renders process, they work in the following way:

The Render Button starts the rendering process, erasing all of the content of the buffers first. Mind that if you have a previous fractal on the buffers. At first time it just starts the renders process since there’s nothing in the buffers. If you have stopped the rendering process and press again the Render button, it will show a warning message telling you that the previous content of the buffers will be erased.



Answer “Yes” if you want to erase all or “No” if you don’t want to lose the previous content of the buffer.
Once the render process starts, this button disappears, and the Stop button becomes visible.

The Stop Button just stops the renders process. You can use it to interrupt all of the threads on the program that are rendering the fractal. By pressing this button, also it makes visible both Render and Continue Buttons.

The Continue Button works in the same way that the Render Button, by starting the rendering process, but with the difference that it doesn’t erase the content of the buffers.

This is useful if you have stopped the fractal rendering process (for saving, an image for example) and wants to continue. A word of warning: Since the Continue button didn’t erase the content of the buffers, if you stop the render process and rotates, zoom ,pan or change any parameter of the fractal, both new and old contents will be showed (you will get for example, double images).

An important note: By the pressing the Render or the Continue button, the preview panel will turn black. Use the Preview button to see the fractal while its being calculated).


The “I’m Working” Gear



This is a little green gear that appears once the rendering process started (by the pressing of the Start or the Continue button). It begins to rotate while the fractal is being calculated. It disappears once you press the Stop button.


The View Controls

These are three controls, on where zoom, rotation and pan are defined. These are:


Rotation Control



Labelled “Rot”, this control has four options:* TBll, Free trackball rotation
* Xr, X axis rotation.
* Yr, Y axis rotation.
* Zr, Z axis rotation.

Use the left mouse button over the view window to make the desired rotations.


Position Control



Labelled “Trans”, this control defines the position, of the fractal on the view window.
Its has four options:* XYt, Free X and Y translations.
* Xt, Translations only in the X axis.
* Yt, Translations only in the Y axis.
* Zt, Translations in the Z axis.

Use the left mouse button over the view window to make the desired translations.


The Zoom Control



This control defines how much the fractal is zoomed in the view windows. It consists in a slider that you can move using the left mouse button. You can also zoom using the mouse wheel.


The Help and Quit buttons.



The Help button for the moment brings you an online help (situated at www.incendia.net), and the Quit button just closes the program.

The principal functionality of this panel is to define the shading options for the fractal renders.



This panel has the following elements:


The Material Selector



This consists in a numeric display and two control arrows. The numeric display show the material slot on where the ambient and diffuse textures are applied.
There are 10 material slots on INCENDIA, and everyone can be used by the baseshapes.
In the case of a fractal that doesn’t use baseshapes, the material slot “0” is applied.


The Ambient and Diffuse Texture Buttons



When you press these buttons, a texture panel appears:



In this panel, you can select the texture that will be applied to the desired material component that you have selected (Ambient or Diffuse) for the current material slot.

The panel consists in a texture preview window, two navigation arrows in one side and three buttons (“Ext. Texture”, “Cancel” and “Ok”). Also, if there’s a previous selected texture, it will appears surrounded by a green lit square.

You can use the arrows to navigate in the texture library, and click on the desired texture to select it. Once that is done, you can press the “Ok” button to apply it to the selected material slot. If you don’t want to apply the texture, just press the Cancel button. Also, if you want to use a texture that doesn’t appears on the material editor, you can press the “Ext. Texture” button. This button opens a file panel and lets you navigate in your hard drive to get the desired texture.

A note on external textures: INCENDIA use BMP files (*.bmp), with are very common in Windows systems. In the next beta release I will add other file formats such as PNG and JPG.


Ambient and Diffuse Texture Images



These two images shows the selected textures for both ambient and diffuse elements.
The top one is the Ambient element and the bottom one is the Diffuse element for the current material slot.
The explanation of these material elements are on the Material Parameters Panel.


The Shading Options panel



In this panel there are defined various shading options that INCENDIA uses.
These options are:

Enable Fog: Activates or deactivates the use of Fog in the render. By activating it, the Fog Color Control becomes visible. This fog isn’t affected by the illumination parameters of the fractal.

White Shader: Activates a Charcoal render style, made of grey random pixels. There are no colors in the render.

Black and White: Its like the Charcoal render, but instead of using grey shades, it uses only black pixel over a white background.

Volumetric Fog: Activates the calculation of the Volumetric Fog (do not confuse it with the standard fog, This fog is affected by the light that illuminates the fractal, being shadowed if the fractal blocks the light over it.

SkyLight: Activates the use of the skylight background. This background follows the light position around the fractal and generates realistic sunrises and sunsets. The calculation of the skylight colors are based on the “A Practical Analytic Model for Daylight” paper, located at http://www.cs.utah.edu/vissim/papers/sunsky/

Fresnel Equations: Activates the calculations of the Fresnel coefficients (Reflection and Refraction) in the surface of the fractal. The colors are taken from the Skylight equations and they are added to the actual colors of the surface.


The Material Parameters Panel



In this panel there are defined several parameters that controls the actual appearance of the materials. These controls are sliders that are used change the parameters.
They are defined as follow:

Fog Parameters (“Fog P. A” and “Fog P. B” )

These fog parameters define how dense and the spread of the fog.
Fog P. A: Fog density, lower the value, higher the density of the fog
Fog P. B: Starting position of the fog, or how much it spreads. At higher values, the fog spread more. (needs revisions) .
The Fog color is defined in the Fog Color control.

Sun Turbidity (Sun T.)
This parameter determines the amount of dust in the air for the skylight atmospheric calculations. The effect is to redden the atmosphere at higher values.

Fresnel Equation Parameters (Fresnel Ext., Fresnel Int.)
These parameters define the Fresnel coefficients (external reflection and internal refraction) for the surface of the fractal. The colors of the refracted and reflected light are taken from the skylight equations.

The Ambient, Diffuse and Specular elements.
These parameters controls the material surface properties, they are defined as follow:

The Ambient parameter controls how bright or dark the ambient texture will be. For example, if you set it to 0.5, the Ambient texture brightness will be half of the actual texture values. If you set it to 2.0, for example, the brightness will be twice of the original texture
This parameter isn’t affected by the light source, its defines the color of the surface of the fractal.

The Diffuse parameter works in the same way that the Ambient parameter, controlling how bright or dark the texture will be. This parameter is affected by the light source, being illuminated by it (or shadowed if the light source is blocked.

The Specular parameters controls the specular elements of the specular reflection. They are divided in:
Specular: This parameter controls how concentrated the specular reflection is. If you set it to lower values, the specular reflection will be diffused over the illuminated face of the fractal.
Specular Intensity: This controls the brightness of the specular element.

The Shadow Depth parameter.
This parameter determines the darkness of the shadows. If you set it to 1.0, the shadows disappears.

Volumetric Fog color components
These three parameters controls the Red, Green and Blue elements of the volumetric fog. If the values are positive, the fog color is added to the image, by the contrary, if they are negative, the fog will be subtracted from the image . A good example of this is in the following images:

Light Volumetric Fog



Dark Volumetric Fog




The Reset Materials Button



This button restore the default values in the material parameters panel.


The Estandard Fog Color control



This control is only visible if fog is enabled, and consists in three (Red, Green and Blue) bars that you can use for defining the the actual color of the fog.


The Save Bitmap Button



This button saves the fractal to Bitmap (*.BMP) file. If you press it while the fractal is being rendered, the rendering process stops, and the program begins to save the file. The saving speed is determined by various factor, such as the resolution and the resampling quality. There’s an percent indicator in the lower right of the view panel that show you the progress of the save process. Once the file is saved, you can continue the render process by pressing the Continue button or start a new one by pressing the Render button.


The Save and Load Materials Buttons



These buttons saves and loads the actual configuration of the materials, including the textures assigned to the material slots (by the name reference, not the actual texture data).


The Clear Fog Button



This button clears the volumetric fog buffer. Use it if you want to restart the volumetric fog calculations.


The Clear Shadows Button



This Button clears the shadow buffer. By clearing it you can get a shadowless scene. Once the rendering process continues, the shadow calculations also begins to fill the buffer.


The Surface Method Selector



This is experimental. It defines the way on where the surface triangles are calculated. Since every pixel on the image is the result of the averaged values of the surface normals, I have tested various methods (six of them), to interpolate these normals. You can see the differences by saving the same fractal with every method. By default I have selected method 4, but I still haven’t decided if that method will remain.

In this panel there are the basic projection, resolution and light direction controls.




The controls are:

The Resolution Control



This control defines the fractal resolution in pixels. You can select the resolution and apply it by pressing the Change button.


The Light Direction Control



This control consists in a central green ball and a small golden ball. You can move the golden ball by using the left mouse button (even behind the green ball), and it defines the light direction vector.

Since this vector is used to calculate the shadows on the fractal, move it before starting the fractal calculation, because if you move it while the fractal is being calculated, the shadows will look incorrect.

This control also defines the position of the sun if you have enabled the Skylight option in the render panel.
Hint: Move it behind the green ball, near the middle and enable the Skylight option if you want to get a sunset background.


The Projection Selector



This selector is used to define the type of projection that the virtual camera will use.

The values are: Orthographic Projection and Perspective Projection

When this projection is selected, a perspective aperture control becomes visible. Use it to define the aperture of the virtual camera. (Needs to fix this, cameras doesn’t have negative apertures :| )


The Cycles selector:



This selector is used to define how many iteration cycles (in thousands) are calculated in every render loop. This is mainly used to define how many cpu cycles Incendia will use. For example, if you set it to 32, Incendia will not use too much cpu cycles and it doesn’t have too much impact on the overall computer environment. Set it to 256 and you will notice that the computer will concentrate all of the cpu cycles in the rendering process. The effect of this is an slowness in the controls and in any other program that is running on the computer. Use this when you want to leave the machine alone rendering fractals.


The Camera Reset buttons



These buttons are used to reset the fractal position, rotations and scaling.

- The Reset Position button: centers the fractal on the view window.
- The Reset Rotation button: cancels any rotation that was applied to the fractal.
- The Rescale button: Cancels any scaling applied to the fractal.


The Grid Selector



This control let you chose between four types of grids in the preview window

(IMPORTANT: these grids are only guides, the doesn’t affect the image renders)

They are:


None
No grid is show.

Cross
A green cross that divides the view panel in four areas and marks the center of it.

Thirds
It divides the the view panel in thirds. If you want to create some artistic fractals, center the most important part of the composition in one of the four crosses that appears when the lines cross.

Divine 1
Divides the plane with a golden mean (divine) proportion for the square panel. Once again, try to center the most important part of your composition in one of the four crosses.

Divine 2
Just like the previous option, but this time the sides of the composition follows the golden mean.

This panel controls the baseshape operations



The elements are:

The Edit Control



This control opens and closes the baseshape editor.
It also, changes the view windows from the estandard point based render, to a vector representation of the fractal elements.


The Open Button



This button opens all of the elements of the editor. Works only if there are baseshapes.


The New and Delete Buttons



These buttons creates and remove baseshapes.


The New Button opens the baseshape selector and once a baseshape is selected, it opens the parameter controls.

The Delete Button deletes the current baseshape.


The Baseshape Browser Arrows



These two arrows let you to move into the baseshape list.
In the View Windows, the selected baseshape are in red, while the unselected ones are green.


The Selected Baseshape Label



This label shows the number of the current baseshape.


The Append, Load and Save Buttons



These buttons are used for saving, restoring and appending baseshapes from a file.

The Save Button Saves the baseshapes to a file.

The Load Button Imports baseshapes from a file, replacing current ones.

The Append Button Appends baseshapes to the current ones from a file.


The Baseshape Selector



This control let you to choose the baseshape, by clicking on the baseshape image. You can use the arrows (situated on the right side of the control) to move around the baseshape list.
Once the baseshape is selected, the Baseshape Parameters Control will be visible.


The Baseshape Parameter Control



This Control determines the baseshape iteration depth, size and many other parameters that baseshapes requires. they are:

Depth: This parameter determines how many fractal iteration are calculated for the baseshape. If you set it to 1, no fractal iterations are calculated.

Radius: This parameter determines the actual size of the baseshape.

P1..P13: These are baseshape specific parameters. They are different in every baseshapes (for example, in the Torus, P1, determines the size of the torus inner circle). You can use the Tab control to move around the different parameter sets.

The Random Button: Randomizes the parameters of the current baseshape (not works in all baseshapes).


The Show Baseshape Option



This option allow to show or hide the un-iterated baseshape. This come handy in fractals like the quaternion julia set, because the original baseshape can be bigger than the iterated ones, effectively hiding them.
This is an example of the effect of this option:



The show baseshape option turned off and on.


The Baseshape Scaling, Rotation and Shear Controls


The Scale Control



This control let you change the scaling of the baseshape in X, y and Z direction (Don’t confuse it with the radius parameter, that gives an uniform scaling).


The Shear Control



This control let you shear the baseshape in many directions.


The Rotation control



This control uses a small trackball to determine the rotation of the baseshape. Theres a little selector on the left side of the control that you can use to restrict the rotation. The options are:

T, Full trackball rotation.

X, Rotation restricted in the X axis.

Y, Rotation restricted in the Y axis.

Z, Rotation restricted in the Z axis.

0, Resets the rotation of the baseshape.

The Panel and View Window Selectors
These selectors determine how are rendered the viewports and the controls of them in the View Windows. They are:

The Panel Selector



This selector alternates between the vector representation of the elements of the scene, and the actual camera itself. The options are:

Vector, The Estandard editor representation.

Points, A real time view of the fractal. Use it if you want to fine tune the baseshape parameters.
Note: The mouse controls of the Vector representation remains in this view mode.


The View Window Selector



This selector let you chosse between four types of viewports:

Camera: The actual camera angle, you can rotate and pan the camera (using the mouse buttons). The baseshape and viewport movements are restricted to the (X,Z) plane.

Front: This is a front viewport (+Z). Here you can use the right mouse button to change the baseshape position in the (X,Y) plane. The left mouse button let you pan over the plane, and the zoom slider let you zoom in it.

Left: In this vieport (-X), you can control the movement of the baseshape in the (Y,Z) plane with the right mouse button. The left mouse button let you pan over the plane, and the zoom slider let you zoom in it.

Top: In this vieport (+Y), you can control the movement of the baseshape in the (X,Z) plane with the right mouse button. The left mouse button let you pan over the plane, and the zoom slider let you zoom in it.


The Control Selector



This selector is mainly used to control how the left mouse button operates in the Camera viewport. The options are:

Rotate, left mouse button will rotate the camera.

Pan, the left mouse button, will be used to pan around the scene.


The Material Selector



This selector assigns a material slot to the current baseshape. Use it when you want to render multiple baseshapes with various materials.


The Editor Window



The Baseshape Editor Window shows the following elements:

The Selected Baseshape: This is a vector representation of the actual baseshape, every change in the editor are reflected on this representation. This element has a red color.

Unselected Baseshapes: This is a vector representation of the various baseshapes that are in the scene. These elements has a green color.

Transformations: The Transformations aren’t used in this editor, but they appears here as 3 dotted circles centered on the transformation axes. These elements has a blue color.

The Scene Center: This element points to the center of the scene (camera rotations happens around this point), and its represented as a green cube.

Iterations Points: These points are the actual iteration of the whole fractal components (baseshapes and transformations). They are white colored and serve as a guide for editing the elements.

This panel controls the baseshape operations



The elements are:


The Edit Control



This control opens and closes the Tranformation editor.
It also, changes the view windows from the estandard point based render, to a vector representation of the fractal elements.


The New and Delete Buttons



These buttons creates and remove transformations.

The New Button generates a new transformations.

The Delete Button deletes the current transformation.


The Transformation Browser Arrows



These two arrows let you to move into the transformation list.
In the View Windows, the selected transformation are in yellow, while the unselected ones are blue.


The Save and Load Buttons



These buttons saves and load the current set of tranformations to a file.

The Save Button Saves the set of tranformations to a file.

The Load Button Load a set of tranformations from a file (it changes the current fractal type if the transformations are from a different fractal).


The Selected Transformation Label



This label shows the number of the current transformation.


The Flame Variations Control



This controls is only useable when you have selected the Flame Fractal type.
You can use the selectors (located in the left side of the panel) to activate the variations. Also, you can use the right side sliders to change the variations weights (negative weights are allowed, and they give interesting results).
As for the moment, only 10 variations are supported, in next beta releases, this number will be increased.


The Transformation Scaling, Rotation and Shear Controls

The Scale Control



This control let you change the scaling of the transformation in X, y and Z direction. The Uniform option let you scale uniformly along the three axes.


The Shear Control



This control let you shear the transformations in many directions.


The Rotation control



This control uses a small trackball to determine the rotation of the transformation. Theres a little selector on the left side of the control that you can use to restrict the rotation. The options are:

T, Full trackball rotation.

X, Rotation restricted in the X axis.

Y, Rotation restricted in the Y axis.

Z, Rotation restricted in the Z axis.

0, Resets the rotation of the transformation.


The Weight Controls



These controls are used to manipulate the weights of every transformation, ther are:

The Weight Parameter Control
This slider is used to control the actual weight of the transformation. Note: The sum of all weights must be 1.0

The Normalize Button
Since the sum of all transformations must be 1.0, this control sums the weights of all transformations and divides it by the result. This scales down the weights and causes that the sum of all will become 1.0

The Equalize Button
This button divides 1.0 by the number of transformations. This cause that every transformation has the same weight value.

The Panel and View Window Selectors
These selectors determine how are rendered the viewports and the controls of them in the View Windows. They are:

The Panel Selector



This selector alternates between the vector representation of the elements of the scene, and the actual camera itself. The options are:

Vector, The Estandard editor representation.

Points, A real time view of the fractal. Use it if you want to fine tune the transformation parameters (specially useful for variations).
Note: The mouse controls of the Vector representation remains in this view mode.


The View Window Selector



This selector let you chosse between four types of viewports:

Camera: The actual camera angle, you can rotate and pan the camera (using the mouse buttons). The transformation and viewport movements are restricted to the (X,Z) plane.

Front: This is a front viewport (+Z). Here you can use the right mouse button to change the transformation position in the (X,Y) plane. The left mouse button let you pan over the plane, and the zoom slider let you zoom in it.

Left: In this vieport (-X), you can control the movement of the baseshape in the (Y,Z) plane with the right mouse button. The left mouse button let you pan over the plane, and the zoom slider let you zoom in it.

Top: In this vieport (+Y), you can control the movement of the baseshape in the (X,Z) plane with the right mouse button. The left mouse button let you pan over the plane, and the zoom slider let you zoom in it.


The Control Selector



This selector is mainly used to control how the left mouse button operates in the Camera viewport. The options are:

Rotate, left mouse button will rotate the camera.

Pan, the left mouse button, will be used to pan around the scene.


The Editor Window



The Transformation Editor Window shows the following elements:

The Selected Transformation: In INCENDIA, the transformations are represented as Dotted Circles. While this representation is clear for showing parameters like rotation, scaling and shear, it will fails on variations. I’m still deciding if this will remains. In the case of the selected transformation, it is colored in bright Yellow.

Unselected Transformations: The unselected transformations are colored in Blue.

Baseshapes: The Baseshapes aren’t used in this editor, but they appears here colored in Green.

The Scene Center: This element points to the center of the scene (camera rotations happens around this point), and its represented as a green cube.

Iterations Preview Points: These points are the actual iteration of the whole fractal components (baseshapes and transformations). They are White colored and serve as a guide for editing the elements.