For this week’s post I’m showing off more of the rendering and layer-compositing options that are part of MathPaint. I’m using the same fractal settings for all of this week’s images – a Mandelbrot set with breakout value at 10.0, max iterations set to 200, and viewed at the (approximate) ranges [-1.432, -1.345] on the x-axis and [-0.026, 0.06] on the y-axis.
Here’s a 5-color linear gradient rendering, with the colors set at iteration-levels 1, 44, 90, 150, and 200:
We can play with not only the assigned colors, but also the way the colors are mapped. Here’s the same fractal using a color cycle, where each level is mapped to the next color and when all colors are used up, it starts again. I get a gradual gradient effect here by using 16 colors, all the same shade of blue that get darker and lighter through the cycle, so it’s a more gentle effect than my previous color cycle examples:
The rest of this week’s images all take advantages of MathPaint’s layered-rendering architecture. Fractals are just one of the types of layers we can create, and all layers support transparency so they can be composited. Here’s another gradient rendering, but in this case the max color is assigned to be transparent, so whatever is in the layer below will show through the set. I’ve put a cartesian function layer underneath to create a pattern with a repeated, gently-skewed sine function:
I also added a couple of CoreImage filters to the above rendering, to add a little extra glow and vibrancy.
The edge-drawing mode that MathPaint supports also leaves a transparent background by default (though you can turn on an opaque background color if desired). Here’s the same fractal rendered in edge mode, with a 2D geometry layer underneath. The polygon is drawn repeatedly with a resize-shape delta applied to create the expanding background pattern:
The final example uses two fractal layers, with the same basic parameters but very different rendering approaches. The front layer only calculates every 10 points on the grid, and draws a circle whose size is scaled by the iteration value, again leaving a transparent background. The underlying layer is rendered with a three-color gradient:
I’m getting pretty excited about the upcoming private beta of MathPaint 1.0! If you want to keep up on MathPaint release news you can “Like” the MathPaint Facebook Page, and if you would like to see more images made with MathPaint just follow Mathaesthetics on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.