From: "Morgan L. Owens" Sent: Monday, May 20, 2002 9:39 AM
The depth code in the formula alone makes them worth it. For the pictures themselves, I found myself reminded of photos of asteroids - partly the mood of the pieces, and partly for the air of discovery about them.
The original depth code stems from a time the formula parser didn't have the IF...THEN...ELSE logic implemented ==> nearly unreadable code and many hours of calculation on my then AMD486DX2/80MHz (not that my present machine is *that* much faster - I'm only marginally ahead of Jim Muth :-)). Interestingly, no one seems to have come up with the idea of *shading* those depth images - selfmade or Fractint's Julibrot types. After all, in a Fractint "3d transform with lightsource" (without x- or y-axis rotation and no perspective) the source depth image would just have the function of a z-buffer. Although, for a satisfying quality of the shaded picture one needs more available depth values in the source image, which would mean .POT output... Regards, Gerald