Proudly released JWildfire V2.00

Hello all, just in time I’m proud to present JWildfire V2.00!  Huge thanks to my family, giving me always enough energy (it sometimes consumes a lot), and also to the JWildfire-community. Special thanks to the beta-testing team, you made a really good job!

PLEASE READ THE RELEASE NOTES 😉

Major new features since V1.90:

  • new detached preview-window (similar to an “external interactive renderer”) which can be have any size and can be placed on a second monitor.
  • ability to use/create motion-curves made from mp3-audio, it has never been easier to create a sound-sync motion of a flame-fractal!
  • You can now create your own buttons to execute your own scripts in the editor!
  • HDR-export has been reworked and also supports background-colors now
  • Easy-to-use and powerful bokeh-like effects
  • support for actually hiding samples, especiall useful for cropping which really crops instead of setting points at a random position or zero
  • many new “reset”-buttons at several tabs to go back to defaults
  • Xaos-tab in Apo-Style, with additional display of captions/variations

Complete list of changes:

  • Bokeh:
    • created a new “Bokeh”-subtab on the “DOF”-tab. Here you can adjust different options to create awesome “bokeh”-like effects. The following styles (with many options) are supported:
      • Bubble
      • Rect
      • Sineblur (using the Sineblur-variation by Zyorg)
      • Starblur (using the STarblur-variation by Zyorg)
      • NBlur (using the NBlur-variation by FractalDesire)
      • Heart
    • button for simply-generation of bokeh-like effects in the main editor – it’s pure fun!
  • Detached preview:
    • created a small detached preview is showing the currently edited flame in constantly increasing quality
    • can be paused by double-clicking, freely resized, and be freely put on any monitor
  • Script-Buttons:
    • you can now create your own buttons to execute your own scripts in the editor!  I. E., you have in the script-tab the possibility to add a persistent
      button to the user-interface to execute a certain script. You may, of course, cutomize it. Just select script and hit the “Add macro button”-button to add a new button to the user-interace which executes this script. You can have as many buttons as you want! You can switch between vertical and horizontal (default) in the Prefs.
    • added 5 default macro-buttons (which also may be customized or removed)
  • New flame-generators, gradient-generators and variations:
    • new “Xenomomorph”-random-flame-generator
    • new “Black&White”-random-flame-generator inspired by the “B&W converter”-script by Brad Stefanov and Mick Hogan
    • new “Stripes”-random-gradient-generator
    • new “dinis_surface”-variation
    • new “pre_rect”-variation
    • new “power_block”-variation by cothe and dark-beam
    • new “exblur”-variation by zephyrtronium and dark-beam
    • new “target_sp”-variation by dark-beam
    • new “yin_yang”-variation by dark-beam
    • new “devil_warp”-variation by dark-beam
    • new “polylogarithm”-variation by dark-beam
    • new “bsplit”-variation by Raykoid666 and Nic Anderson
    • new “whitney_umbrella”-variation by Don Town
    • new “ennepers2”-variation by dark-beam
    • new experimental “xheart_blur”-variation (which bases on “xheart” by Xyrus02)
  • Editor:
    • the optional grid and display of affine transforms should be correct aligned to the center now
    • the fading-slider of the realtime-preview now got a hint and actually can fade the preview to black (thanks to Martin Flink)
    • experimental channel-mixer which applies upto 9 color-curves to the raw colors (before applying the gamma-correction)
      • brightness
      • rgb (one curve for each color component)
      • full (three curves for each color component)
    • new property “Fade to White” at the color-tab
    • two new columns showing the variations/caption in the xaos-view
    • many new “reset”-buttons at several tabs to go back to defaults
    • display the layer number in layer-preview
    • new option to draw guides (center point, rule of thirds and the golden ratio) as known from Apo in the editor. You may control the colors and line-widths by changing the properties tinaEditorGuidesCenterPointColor, tinaEditorGuidesRuleOfThirdsColor, tinaEditorGuidesGoldenRatioColor and tinaEditorGuidesLineWidth in the Preferences-window
    • the “Xaos”-tab now features the “from”- and “to”-views as known from Apo
  • Motion-curves:
    • added more clear indicators to show if a motion curve is present or not
    • ability to use/create motion-curves made from mp3-audio, it has never been easier to create a sound-sync motion of a flame-fractal!
    • ability to transform (shift, scale) motion-curves in the motion-curve-dialog
    • increased the preview quality in the motion-curve-dialog (may be slower, but makes sense to see more detail here)
    • improved the behaviour of “view-all”-function in the motion-curve-dialog
    • added support for animating the shift-paremeter of gradients by using motion-curves
    • added support for animating weight, color, color-speed and opacity of transforms by using motion-curves
  • Batch-Renderer:
    • options to specify custom (individual) sizes or quality-levels in the batch-renderer
    • option to override (re-render) images in the Batch-renderer
    • ability to display also rendered images in the batch-renderer
  • Other changes
    • 30 new images for the launcher
    • reworked the whole HDR-export again, background-color is supported now
    • created a fix to avoid the default “overexposing” of many flames, i.e. most renders should look darker by default, but should look more smooth
    • retain selected layer after “Undo”/”Redo”
    • smoother transition between DoF and non-DoF-areas
    • support for actually hiding samples, especiall useful for cropping which really crops instead of setting points at a random position or zero
    • changed the “*crop”, “*circlecrop” and “fract*”-variations to use the new mechanism to hide samples (should remove an “annoying vertical line” in some cases)
    • added a new experimental option to make the program (and the OS) more responsible while rendering. This is enabled by default. Change the property “tinaResponsiveness” in the Prefs-window to tune the behaviour
    • the launcher now shows an error message (different from the technical java-error) when it detects a 32bit java and a memory usage below 1 GB
    • several small optimizations to the renderer
    • optimized the refresh of the display of the interactive renderer (disable property tinaOptimizedRenderingIR in the Prefs if this makes problems on slow machines)
    • experimental support for an additional alpha channel which can be modified by variations
    • added a new method tho the scripting-interface which creates a new random flame when there is currently no flame in the editor. This simplifies the script-initializing code
    • some experimental OpenCl-code, the option to use it is hidden in the launcher (double-click to center-image to make it visible)
    • fixed a bug in the renderer causing a bright spot at (0,0) sometimes
    • fixed a bug regarding the update of the frame slider in the main editor. Fixed a bug regarding the length of the gradient-guide on the transformation-color-tab
    • tried to make the Interactive Renderer behave more “smooth”
    • added two new parameters to “fract_*”-variations: “z_fill” to fill the vertical gaps in 3d-mode, “z_logscale” to use log-scale in z-direction (nice for creating 3D-meshes)
    • fixed an unwanted “dot” in the “primitives_wf”-variation, when drawing a pyramid-shape
    • fixed dark background in the help-section

Now enjoy! 🙂