Apo Mandelbrot Plugin Coloring

Just a couple examples of rendering with Apo using an updated Mandelbrot plugin (supporting 3D and coloring) and a homebuilt Apo with plugin coloring support enabled. The plugin-based coloring for the Mandelbrot plugin leverages the current Apo gradient.

An escape-time algorithm is used to generate the Mandelbrot set points, and a Normalized Iteration Count algorithm is used for generating the smoothed colors. You'd see significant color banding without it. (What banding you see in the rendered image here is actually due to the low number of colors (256) supported by the gradient in Apo.) The smoothing is also used for the 3D aspect (which of course has an effect only on flames rendered using a 3D Apo version).

The top row shows two flames rendered with plugin-directed coloring support, and the bottom shows the same flames rendered with coloring support disabled (which is what you'd see if you used the official Apo release, currently 2.08x as of the time of this writing).

Note that I built the coloring support over a year ago, so the "colorized" flames in the above renders were created using an older version of Apo (based on the 2.06 3D hack sources). The updated plugin runs fine under any version, however.

If there's interest I can post the updated plugin and sources (either replacing my old, slower Delphi version as a plugin resource here on dA, or perhaps add it to the apo-plugins SourceForge project). Or maybe both.

Jed