MachineCodex Software is proud to announce the availability of our new Mandelbrot plugin for Quartz Composer. Read more to download the package installer. Or read a discussion about using the Mandelbrot patch.

Update 31st August 2008: MandelbrotQC 0.6a released. This version significantly improves rendering speed.

About

A custom patch for Quartz Composer which generates an image of the Mandelbrot or Julia sets with parameters for zoom, x, y, colour and colouring algorithm, and more.

• Fully animatable
• Zooms in up to 1,000,000 x magnification
• 5 different colour algorithms
• Renders to an Image output port
• Customisable size
• Mandelbrot and Julia algorithms

The installer disk image contains 3 compositions demonstrating various applications of the plugin. Note that these will only work after the Installer has been run and the plugin is installed. No restart is required.

A note about speed

The Mandelbrot calculation is very CPU intensive. Version 0.6a includes a number of optimisations which improve rendering speed by about 5 times over the earlier versions. I now see framerates of 2 - 15 fps on a 2.4GHz Core2Duo. I hope to optimise this further in future versions.

It may be helpful to know that black pixels (the pixels inside the set) require the longest calculation times. Therefore, the larger the area of black in a render, the longer it will take.

Requires

Mac OS X 10.5.x Leopard

Download

Download MachineCodex Mandelbrot 0.6a for Quartz Composer Installer. (70 KB)

Discussion