Our little joy, 3D fractals explorer called Mandelbulber, was updated yesterday. The new version has some nice new features as well as bugfixes.

The first change is a new formula called FoldingIntPow2. Here is a quick preview created by Krzysztof Marczak, Mandelbulber's lead developer:

The other important new feature is preview in the Open File dialog. It takes a while to render, but even so it's much better than guesswork, isn't it?

Finally the image view window got two comboboxes: for setting zoom mode and for choosing what happens when you click inside.

The rest of the changes are:

• improved quality of Depth of Field effect;
• improved calculation of raytracing steps:
  • added dynamic correction of estimated distance;
  • added possibility to switch between logaritmic and linear fuction for distance estimation;
• user invisible improvements of source code: cleaning up, refactoring, optimizations etc.

Builds for 32bit and 64bit versions of Linux, as well as a Windows installer are available to download.

More on this topic:

• Mandelbulber 1.04 released with new fractal formulas
• Mandelbulber 1.02 adds volumetric lights
• Fragmentarium 0.8.0 adds new fractal types, simple animation and more raytracer features
• Mandelbulber 0.99 brings 360 degrees panoramic views to 3D fractals
• Fragmentarium: a new GPU-side generative art tool