Karlos wrote:
@ 23JUL/JULES :-)
Thanks for the link. The mechanism there reminds me of a trick used to speed up a mandelbrot generator I tried once. It had a mask to define already calculated pixels and used this border tracing to determine the region that had reached the iteration limit, bound it off and 'flood fill' the area as being already rendered.
Ah damn. Beaten to it. I came up with the same algorithm after staring at the blue/gray picture for a while. I have the nagging feeling you could do something clever with edge detection algorithms followed by a fast byte/word scanner to get a rough idea where the outlines of the blobs are. Then you can let loose the above algorithm. Finally wrap up with a box-within-box algorithm and merge them as necessary. But you're looking at an O(N^high integer) algorithm at the very least.
By the way, if you can locate Nico François' TurboMandel (or MandelVroom, forgot the exact name) you can witness a fractal flood fill in action. It was quite a sight to see fractals rendered in seconds rather than hours on a lowly 68000 :-).
