From IncendiaWiki

Contents 1 Introduction 2 The Resolution Control 3 The Light Direction Control 4 The Projection control 5 The Shadow control 6 The Cycles control 7 The Camera Reset buttons 8 The Grid control 9 The Symmetry Control

Introduction

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 2XAA option is for AntiAliasing. When this option is active, Incendia internally doubles the current resolution and scale it down when the user request to save the image. The overhall effect of this is in the quality of the image, since it becomes smoother.

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 control

This control is used to define the type of projection that the virtual camera will use.
The values are: Orthographic Projection and Perspective Projection.
When the Perspective option 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 Shadow control

This selector enables or disables the shadow calculation for the current image.
Since shadow calculations are slowdowns the image generation, you can disable the shadow generation while rendering and once its is finished, you can start the shadow calculation (use the CONTINUE button instead of the RENDER button, because the last one will clear the display).
When the shadow calculation is enabled, the Shadow Type control becomes visible on the Material Panel.

The Cycles control

This control 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:

• Reset Position, centers the fractal on the view window.
• Reset Rotation, cancels any rotation that was applied to the fractal.
• Scale, Cancels any scaling applied to the fractal.

The Grid control

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.

The Symmetry Control

This control let you change the various symmetries avaliable from the symmetrica module.
The following options are available:

• Normal, no symmetries are used.
• Tetrahedron, Tetrahedral symmetry (four triangular faces).
• Octahedron, Octahedral symmetry (eight triangular faces).
• Hexahedron, Cubic symmetry (six square faces).
• Octahedron, Octahedral symmetry (twelve triangular faces).
• Icosahedron, Icosahedral symmetry (twenty triangular faces).
• Penta, Pentagonal symmetry (five triangular faces).
• Loxodrome, Loxodromical symmetry (100 faces with no symmetry applied to every face).
• Sphere, Hyperbolical transformation (not follow any symmetry).