Access Minimum Iterations

The past week or so, I've been developing a new coloring algorithm. The basic idea was to use the minimum iteration of the image to help determine how the image was colored.

I know the software reports the minimum iterations for the current image in a separate window, but I haven't seen any way to access that information within a formula. Is there any way to access that information for coloring purposes?

Thanks.

No. The global minimum iterations isn't known until after the fractal is finished rendering, so there is no way to use it while rendering. But you could make your algorithm use a parameter for the value. It would start off as a complete guess, of course, but after one render you could change the value to the minimum iterations value from the render statistics window and re-render to get a more accurate coloring. Just make sure your algorithm doesn't go too crazy when the parameter is obviously wrong; for example, if the min iters parameter is 50 and the orbit only has 3 points, generate some color (or perhaps use the solid color) rather than throwing an error.

Alright. Thinking more on it, that does fit with how UF renders images. What I was hoping was application with animations. Instead of setting keyframes individually to change the parameter when the min-iteration changed, it'd handle that automatically.

Thanks for responding.

You can't easily do this because in Ultra Fractal, each pixel is calculated as a separate, stand-alone entity that isn't influenced by the rest of the image. This for example allows the image to be subdivided for parallel calculations with multi-core processors and even networked computers.

Your proposed coloring algorithm would possibly change the coloring if you zoom in and frame a different portion of the fractal, with a different minimum iterations value. That would be pretty weird.

However, if you really want to, you can put all of the formula and coloring code in the global section of the coloring algorithm, and store information per pixel in a 2D array equal to the size of the image. You can now determine the minimum iteration count and color based on that. See this help topic to get started: http://www.ultrafractal.com/help/writing/formulas/globalsections.html