Mandelbrot Fractals

An old project of mine, to generate beautiful, and zoomable basic fractals.

Features

• It allows you to build the fractals, navigate, and zoom via mouse selection of specific are, or by keyboard.
• Zooming can be done using different floating-point precision variables, to show how rounding errors will lead to artifacts.
• You can set coloring gradient to your test (use left & right mouse buttons on color plate for that).
• Configure iterations and other things.
• You can save a picture at any point.

Tools

This project is a WinForms projects, and built using VB.Net and v3.5 Framework.

I used special methods Marshal.WriteByte to manipulate and draw the images directly into the memory, for maximum performance.

Also remember to use code optimization (in VS project settings) in the release to get best calculation speed.

Credits

RGB <-> HSL color space convertor (used for more beautiful gradients) is taken from:

http://www.bobpowell.net/rgbhsb.htm