From IncendiaWiki

Introduction

Main Controls

The Save Bitmap Button

This button exports the fractal to Windows 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 re-sampling quality.
There’s a 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 PNG Button

This button save the fractal to Portable Network Graphic file (*.PNG) 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 re-sampling quality.
There’s a 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.

Transparencies
When the fractal is exported to the PNG fileformat, the following rules for transparencies are applied:

If the fractal has no background (either skylight or image) and the volumetric for isn't enabled, the areas on where the is present are considered fully opaque, and the empty areas will appear fully transparent.
If the volumetric fog is enabled and the fractal has no background, the fractal areas are considered opaque, but the transparency of the areas covered by the volumetric fog will follow the fog density (more denser the fog, more opaque the transparency index will be).
If the image has a background enabled, the entire image will be considered opaque (no transparencies).
If the "AlphaC=Fog" option is enabled and there's no background, the transparency of the areas covered by the fractal will be calculated by the density of the standard fog algorithm (no the volumetric fog).

The Save and Load Materials Buttons

These buttons save and load 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 Materials and Textures Tab

This Tab panel is divided in three control tabs:

The Materials and Textures Tab, for defining the materials parameters.
The Environment Tab, for changing and defining various environment parameters.
The Shaders Tab, for setting different shaders effects to the final image.

The Material Selection buttons

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

Ambient and Diffuse Texture Images

These two images show 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 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 five buttons ("Color", "Grad.", “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.

Color Gradients appears in this panel labeled by a little "G":

The Color Button is used for defining an specific color to the texture. if you select it a color selector panel will appear:

The Gradient (grad.) Button is used for loading a Fractint color map file, that will be used for illuminating the surface of the fractal with the different colors of the map file.
Incendia will prompt you for the Fractint map file and once it is loaded, the gradient will appear on the Ambient and Diffuse texture buttons, being the lower part the area less illuminated and the upper part, the most illuminated area:

The Material Parameters Panel

In this panel there are defined several parameters that controls the actual appearance of the materials.
Is important to note that the material parameters are exclusive for every texture slot, unlike previous Incendia versions on where they where applied to all slots.

They are defined as follow:

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.

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 or a bitmap background.

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

The Reset Materials Button

This button restore the default values in the material parameters panel for current slot.

The Shading Options Tab

This Panel is for defining various environment shading options:

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.

Background: Activates the use of the background either using skylight equations or a simple bitmap file. When this option is selected, the following control appears:

The options are:

Skylight: 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.
Image:This option let you use a simple bitmap for a background. Use the load button for loading the image.

Drawing: This option select an special drawing mode, that consist in three drawing types. When you select it, a control will become visible:

The options are:

Standard: This option tries to mimic a drawing on a paper.
Radial Gradient: The colors are determined by gradient slope.
Angular Gradient: The colors are defined by the angular direction of the gradient.

Drawing types
Standard Drawing	Radial Gradient	Angular Gradient

It's important to note that the gradient color can be changed by selecting a gradient in the first material slot: The Ambient and Diffuse Texture Buttons.

The Standard 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 Environment Controls

The Environment Control let you change many of the environment parameters.
This control has the following options:

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.

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.

Volumetric Fog Types
Light Volumetric Fog	Dark Volumetric Fog

The Reset Environment Parameters Button

This button restore the default values in the environment parameters.

The Shader Tab

This Tab is for controling various shader effects for Incendia.

The Light Distribution control

Defines how the Diffuse light will be mapped over the surface of the fractal.
The options are:

Standard: The distribution of the diffuse light is calculated in the standard way.
Sine Stripes: The distribution of the diffuse light is perturbed by a sine wave.
Cosine Stripes: The distribution of the diffuse light is perturbed by a cosine wave.
Exponential: The light intensity is calculated by using an exponential function
Random: The light intensity is perturbed by an small random value
Interference: The distribution of the diffuse light calculated by an interference pattern.
Soft Light: The light intensity is evenly distributed over the surface of the fractal.

Light Distribution Shader
Sine Stripes	Cosine Stripes.jpg	Exponential
Random	Interference	Soft Light

The Surface Average Filter control

These averaging filters are used for smoothing the noise over the fractal surface.
The options are:

No Average: No averaging is calculated for the surface.
Median: The surface is averaged by a Median filter.
Mean II: The surface is averaged by using a Mean filter.
Mid Range: The Mid Range filter is applied to the surface.
Sobel: The Sobel gradient filter is used for averaging the surface.

The Ambient Occlusion Shader

This control enables or disables two variations of the Ambient Occlusion shader.
These variations are:

Per Pixel Ambient Occlusion: Calculates the ambient occlusion for every pixel.
When this option is selected, the ambient occlusion control becomes visible,

The parameters are:

Samples: Number of samples tested for every pixel. Larger the number, slower the calculation, but more precise.
Radius: Maximun distance (in pixels) from the selected pixel that a sample could reach.

Per Pixel calculation of ambient occlusion is slow, specially on large fractal scenes, but it increased the 3D perception of the fractal surface.
Averaged Ambient Occlusion: Calculates the ambient occlusion from an scaled down rendering of the scene.
When this option is selected, the ambient occlusion control becomes visible,

The parameters are:

Samples: Number of samples tested for every pixel. Larger the number, slower the calculation, but more precise.
Radius: Maximun distance (in pixels) from the selected pixel that a sample could reach.

This version of the shader is faster than the previous one, but has the drawback of the low resolution used (512x512). The calculation starts when the program begins to save a bitmap.

Ambient Occlusion Types
No Ambient Occlusion	PerPixel Ambient Occlusion	Averaged Ambient Occlusion	Combined Ambient Occlusion

Ambient Occlusion Options

The Shadow type control

This control determines how the shadows can be rendered, and it becomes visible when the Shadows calculation are enabled
The options are:

Classic, the standard shadow algorithm.
Smooth, shadows are smoothed, so they remove blocks and cutoff.
Traced, the shadows are smoothed and a boundary is calculated. useful for removing blocks.

The Render Panel