Here are a couple of nice pics which resulted from
my playing around with fractal image programming, with the GIMP and with the raytracer POV-Ray. The fractal images were created in
the full resolution and then downscaled for this web site using anti-aliasing.
The raytracing pics were rendered anew in the desired resolution. Enjoy. (By
the way, here is the POV-Ray source code for the
mask on the side as a gzipped tar file.)
Another raytracing picture: A glass
figure-eight knot and a brushed-steel dodecahedron frame float on a piece of
wood on a glittery sea, surrounded by a burning horizon. Here are the POV-Ray source files and the brushed metal image
map in a gzipped tar archive. The "brushed steel" look is from a
theme of the window manager IceWM.
My first raytracing picture, consisting
of a helecoid mirrored in a perfectly reflecting sphere. Here is a tar archive containing the two source files.
This is the fractal of Newton's method for solving
exp(z)=1. The starting points for which the iteration diverges to infinity are
plotted in black. The beautiful curved structure results from inverting the
complex plane with respect to the unit circle. A maximum of 50 iterations were
executed, and the conditions for aborting earlier were numerical overflow
(divergence) and a modulus <0.5 (convergence to 0). You can download the full-sized 1392x1990 image, in gzipped PCX
format.
The well-known Mandelbrot set, computed
with unusual radicalism: The original picture was computed ages ago on an 8 MHz
Atari computer. It took several days to render and was large enough for a 140
by 120 cm poster in 180 dpi resolution. I have since repeated the calculation
on a 600 MHz Pentium III in under a minute. For poster freaks (and paint
program crash testers), here is the
full-sized 9712x8634 image, again in gzipped PCX format (512 kB). Also
available is the source code (Linux port, not
Atari version ;)), documented in German.
Trophy is a racing game with "unusual" features, such as the possibility to machine-gun and bomb competitors. Its tracks are defined by drawing a special image called the "function map", which can be done especially well with the GNU image manipulation program, GIMP. New tracks can easily be created and integrated. I couldn't resist the challenge. Here's a description:
Difficulty: mostly harmless
This track was created using the GIMP and some aerial photographs I found on the web. It runs along the wide roads of a large city. Due to the width of the streets, it is easy to run providing one doesn't take a wrong turning (quite possible). There's plenty of time to concentrate on the "combat" aspect of Trophy. Players driving on the sidewalk and pedestrians' crossings are slowed down by 20% out of consideration for pedestrians. Driving on grass is even slower, and one cannot drive through bushes and trees, which sometimes have branches sticking out into the track. Download gzipped TAR-file of the track (7.1 MB)