Mandelbrot Set Visualizer

Simple app for zooming into Mandelbrot Set.

Here are some screenshots:

No zoom

Zoomed a hundred times

Zoomed a million times

Zoomed a trillion times

The fractal is colored using this formula:

$$(r, g, b) = \frac{255}{2K} \cdot (1 - \cos(R \cdot n), 1 - \cos(G \cdot n), 1 - \cos(B \cdot n))$$ where n is the number of computed iterations before the point exceeded from the set and K, R, G, B are parameters, initialized as:

$$K = 10$$

$$R = 1$$

$$G = \frac{1}{3\sqrt{2}}$$

$$B = \frac{1}{7 \cdot 3^{1 / 8}}$$

For the formula I was inspired by this article.

How to use

Control	Action	Notes
w, up	move up
s, down	move down
a, left	move left
d, right	move right
j	zoom in	Press shift for faster zooming.
k	zoom out	Press shift for faster zooming.
h	decrease number of iterations	-5
l	increase number of iterations	+5
b	zooms back to initial state	It keeps the position and number of maximum iterations, just resets the zoom, so you can zoom in again to where you were before as long as you won't move.
r	zooms back and reset the number of iterations	Zooms back to the original state and also keeps the position. In addition, it resets the value of maximum iterations.
c	color reset	Resets K, R, G and B constants to theirs default values.
1	K = K + 0.5	Press shift for faster change. Press ctrl for decrease
2	R = R + 0.05	Press shift for faster change. Press ctrl for decrease
3	G = G + 0.05	Press shift for faster change. Press ctrl for decrease
4	B = B + 0.05	Press shift for faster change. Press ctrl for decrease
t	toggle info
enter	capture	Saves the current part of the set as a .ppm image in 8K.

You can also move around using mouse.

Building the app (for Linux)

To build the app, simply use the provided makefile and run make. The command will create build directory with the Mandelbrot executable in it. For the compilation to work, one must have installed pgc++ compiler. Installation instructions are here.

To build the app, you alse need SFML library. It should be possible to get it easily from your system's repositories.

Usage

The default width is set to 1200 px, which is enough to look good, but not too much to run too slow. You can change the width using a command line argument. The height is computed automatically as two thirds of the width to maintain the correct ratio.

Mandelbrot [<width>]