JWildfire V1.80 release: opening new worlds

Just released JWildfire V1.80 which is .. again … a striking new version. It features a completely new module designed to generate 3D-models from your fractals in an easy way.
You can use those models in any available  3d-package to create “real” 3d-images with refraction-effects, shadows and whatever you want. You can even animate them. Or you could create solid objects to put onto your (real! ) desktop, or create some extremely cool gift for your girlfriend, by using a 3d-printing-service!

Here is an image demonstrating the basic workflow:


But, please note, that this is a complete new (and independent) module, which will not “impact” the classical flame-fractal-generating in any way. So, if you feel, you will not need this new feature, this is absolutely ok  There are still new worlds to enter with this new version: First, there are some new variations by dark-beam, second, there are significant changes to the random-color-generator, creating now much more interesting results, third: the custom_wf-variations react much more friendly on errors now. Will make it much more fun to try out new formulas and stuff 

Complete list of changes:

• new module to generate meshes from 3d-flame-fractals! The module consists of three parts:
  • a volumetric renderer
  • a mesh generator which uses the marching-cubes-algorithm to generate a mesh from a stack of rendered images
  • a previewer which can either create a quick-preview by some internal renderer or a high quality-preview by using the integrated sunflow-renderer
  • In comparison to some other solutions the module has the following strengths:
    • it works multi-threaded and has decent speed
    • it creates not only vertices, but also vertex normals
    • it is able to process really huge meshes, if you have enough memory
    • the mesh-generator supports additional smoothing and can process any image-stack in the formats supported by JWildfire. So probably you could also convert Mandelbulb3D Voxelstack by using this modeule (I have not tried it, so any feedback is welcome)
    • it is extensible and open source
  • a tutorial-document describing how to use the new module, including an example, is provided in the new help-section (Users of the V1.80 ALPHA: Please note that both the program and the document have changed in several significant ways)
• restructured the Help/About-section, updated some informations, added an Aphophysis-users-hints-page
• improved the “Strong hue”-random-color-generator to produce more interesting results
• black-border-fix for the “bwrands”-variation by dark-beam
• new “log_db”-variation by dark-beam
• new “asteria”-variation by dark-beam
• new “ztwister”-variation by dark-beam
• made the “custom_wf”-variations more robust to errors. If an error occurs during regular calculation (e.g. after loading a flame with errors in the java-code) the variation does nothing. If you edit the code, you cant save it until you fixed the error
• improved start-script for Macs by Matthew Townsend
• new fluent-API to create sunflow-scenes (only interesting for developers)

Enjoy! 

Some recent renders: