Fractal Movies

Welcome to the Fractal Movie page.

The Java Mandelbrot generator

This was written so that zooms and parameter sweeps can be generated in succession automatically. Zooming and shifting of the bounding box and modifying the fractal parameters can be set on the command line. The fractal parameters can be incremented or decremented linearly, logrithmically, or exponentially. You can also specify the period (in frames) which each parameter is modified. The colors are read in from a RGB file similar to fractint's color map files, except these RGB files can consist of an arbitrary number of colors. Each output file is written as an XPM. Unfortunately, the double precision is used instead of the java's BigDecimal class, so the maximum magnification is much smaller than that of fractint's.

Here is the java code for the class jonlin.fractals.MandelbrotGenerator. To execute it, create a directory called 'jonlin/fractals/' in your classpath, put the java source in this directory, compile it, then type: 

java jonlin.fractals.MandelbrotGenerator
All the valid parameters are given if the class has difficulty processing the parameters. The 4 required parameters are: x_size, y_size, colormap_file, and number of colors. By default, only one frame is generated, the output filename will be 'mandel00000.xpm', the bailout value is 16 (z mag squared), the maximum number of iterations is 150. Sizes greater than 500x500 should be used, otherwise scaling errors occur and the escape boundaries will become jagged.

Movies

These movies were generated with the MandelbrotGenerator. The XPM's outputed by the java program were converted to IRIS RGB images using ImageMagick's convert utility, then makemovie was used on an SGI Indy to generate a Quicktime movie from the IRIS RGB images.
These movies were generated to test the functionality of the MandelbrotGenerator. The smaller movies (parameter sweeping) were easy to generate, requiring only a single run which took a little over an hour. The zoom required constant checking and recalibration so the program wouldn't zoom into uninteresting areas.
The '-zoom_limit' option allows one to take a previously generated XPM (the fractal parameters and bounding box values are given in the XPM as comments) and assign a limit point for the zoom shift based on the pixels of the previous XPM. For example, in xv, by clicking the middle button, I see the x and y pixel where I am clicking. With these x and y values, I can run another set of frames with the starting bounding box identical to the one I am viewing in xv, which I assign a zoom limit to the pixel values that I got from xv. The next set of frames will approach this point while zooming.
More movies will be generated as updates are made to the MandelbrotGenerator.

Mandel zoom

These movies consist of frames generated using fractint's VOLCANO color map. About 2000 frames were generated in all, but only 900 made it to the movie. The two movies generated consist of the first 700 frames and the 200th to 1000th frames, in a smaller resolution to save size. Quicktime movie compression was used.

Here is the 21M (gzipped) Quicktime movie with the first 700 frames (300x300): mandel3.mov.gz.
Here is the 16M (gzipped) Quicktime movie with frames 200-1000 and at a lower resolution (200x200): mandel3_small.mov.gz

Here are some of the frames generated:

Mandel Perturb

This movie consists of frames of the Mandelbrot attractor while the x perturbation is incremented, about .01 per frame. About 200 frames were generated for this movie and the BLUES color map was used. The perturbation of the initial x was swept linearly from 0 to about 2. These movies were generated with Quicktime Movie compression at 300x300 resolution and 600x600 resolution.

Here is the 2M (gzipped) Quicktime movie (300x300): mandel_sweep.mov.gz.
Here is the 6M (gzipped) Quicktime movie (600x600): mandel_sweep_big.mov.gz.

Here are some of the frames generated:

This movie consists of frames of the Mandelbrot attractor while the x perturbation is imcremented at about .01 per frame. About 300 frames were generated with the x perturbation swept from -1.5 to 1.5 with the colormap ROYAL. A Quicktime movie was generated at 600x600 resolution using Quicktime Movie compression.

Here is the 4M (gzipped) Quicktime movie (600x600): mandel2_sweep_big.mov.gz.

Here are some of the frames generated:

This is a movie of the Mandelbrot attractor with an x perturbation sweep at about .05 per frame and a partial zoom in the beginning. About 360 frames were generated using the FIRESTRM colormap. The Quicktime movie generated uses Quicktime Movie compression with a resolution of 600x600. The bailout test was modified by the '-bailout_test' parameter to use only the imaginary part of the function value for the bailout test.

Here is the 19M (gzipped) Quicktime movie (600x600): mandel4_sweep_big.mov.gz.

Here are some of the frames generated:

jonlin@tesuji.org

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