hpdz.net

General Information on Fractals and the Mandelbrot Set

A small forum discussing fractals. HPDZ.NET was recently nominated "Fractal Website of the Month" on this forum, so I should at least put a link there, no?	Fractal Forums
This is one of the most comprehensive resources for anything you want to know about the Mandelbrot set and fractals in general. Tons of information and links to other resources. Also a great gallery of what the *real* fractal artists are doing.	Fractalus.com
Although dominated by Poser babes, this is still a great collection of digital art in general, and with a very nice fractal art section. Galleries here cover a huge gamut of styles, including may I would consider not really strictly "fractal art" but rather "art using fractals" but still a great site to visit.	Renderosity
If you thought this was a calm, benign field, think again. This blog offers a completely, totally different perspective on fractal art by commentators who are clearly not afraid to speak their mind. Like it or not, this blog advocates (somewhat viciously at times) for the continued progression of the art and shows no mercy.	orbittrap.blogspot.com
I would love to spend the next 6 months writing a comprehensive dissertation on the Mandelbrot set, but unfortunately, I don't have the time. Fortunately, however, it's already been done. Some parts are highly technical and some are incomplete, but still a good reference.	Mu-Encyclopedia
Here you will find a a very mathematical discussion of the set, along with some nice Java applets illustrating various technical points. There are a few cool animations here too, especially one showing the relationship between points on the M-set and the corresponding Julia set.	The Mandelbrot and Julia Sets Anatomy

Of course you can always check out Wikipedia ("mandelbrot" or "fractal"), but I think their explanations are a bit terse and assume you already know a fair amount of math.

Fractal Rendering Software

UltraFractal: Probably the most sophisticated fractal drawing software out there...although surely not the fastest....	www.ultrafractal.com
Fractint: I believe this was the first high-precision fractal rendering software produced. Not capable of animation directly but can read script files. Still runs in DOS. One of the fastest high-precision fractal rendering tools available, but very old-school core arithmetic functions limit its speed on modern systems. HPDZ.NET has run speed tests which will be published soon.	FractInt
ChaosPro is another rmajor program used extensively by fractal artists. This was used to create the "Amazing Mandelbrot Set" video, which is a collection of about 20 nice but not-so-deep animations of the set.	www.chaospro.de

My own software is not available for distribution. It's too dedicated to animations, too hard to use, and still a bit buggy since I don't put a whole lot of time into maintaining it. It is also completely undocumented.

Other Fractal Animation Web Sites

The Ultimate Fractal Video Project. Home of the "Universe" animations. Lots of cool animation here drawn with FractInt. Run by a hard-core purist, generating high-quality images with no shortcuts.	www.fractal-animation.net
A collection of significant animations of various styles. Includes some high-definition animations.	www.fractalanimation.com
Site for a rather nice DVD featuring about 20 just-barely "deep" zooms (only to E-17 or so) into various locations on the set, created with ChaosPro. Nothing nearly as deep as what you will see here or at UFVP, but nicely done nevertheless. Some evidence of serious frame interpolation is very clear, so much so that it is better characterized as just digital zooming into a still image rather than a deep zoom animation. Nevertheless, it works well and actually smoothes out some of the speckle aliasing you see when drawing raw data frame-by-frame. The DVD also includes a short and quite clear explanation by a mathematician of how the Mandelbrot set is constructed.	www.mandelbrotset.net

Comment: You are not going to find better animations than on the first two sites. Some video posting sites contain complete junk claiming to be some sort of spectacular animation. The best animations on the web are at the above two sites, and will be coming soon to this site as well.

Music

I love the music of Technetium and plan to feature it in more videos, but just the best of the best. I don't want to waste this great music on a mediocre animation.

Technetium Music

Video and Audio Software

Most of the software I use for encoding the AVI files my program generates, and also mixing the music with the videos, comes from Sony. I currently use Vegas Pro 8 and Acid Pro 6. Sometimes I also use Cinescore to generate music for the videos.	www.sonycreativesoftware.com
I occasionally use SonicFire Pro 4 by SmartSound to generate music. They have a better music library than Sony's Cinescore, but the software doesn't integrate with Vegas, so it is a bit of a hassle for me to use it for this application.	www.smartsound.com