JWildfire 3.10 release: improved image-quality and much other fun

Just released JWildfire V3.10.

Among a lot of different changes, two major features stand out: improved image-quality (sharpening and anti-aliasing) and an easy-to-use background-gradient-function.

Complete list of changes (you can also see this list inside the program at the any time, see Help->List of changes ):

  • Image-quality:
    • new “Filtering”-option at the Anti-Aliasing/Filtering-tab to distinguish between the various types of filtering:
      GLOBAL_SHARPENING, GLOBAL_SMOOTHING, ADAPTIVE. The “Filter kernel” option is populated accordingly.
    • new MITCHELL_SMOOTH-filter kernel (derived from MITCHELL), which is now the default
    • improved the behaviour of sharpening filters (causing less artifacts)
    • “Sharpness indicator” and “Low density”-parameters at the “Anti-Aliasing/Filter”-tab (affects only adaptive filtering)
    • new experimental adaptive MITCHELL_SINEPOW-filter (sharpenung details, smoothing “unsharp” areas as well as areas with low density)
    • new “low brightness”-property to show/hide areas with lower density, increasing this value usually leads to more detail, while decreasing
      this value may help to hide unwanted border areas
    • increased default oversampling to 2 in order to increase default quality
  • Editing:
    • reimplemented the preview-cache (all options at the coloring-tab do not need a recalculation do show changes). In general, all properties
      which do not need a re-render are indicated by a star at the label, e.g. “Brightness*”. Is is recommended to do a quickrender before adjusting them,
      so can apply changes in almsot realtime to a decent image.
    • improved the quality of the preview in the main editor
    • the channel-mixer also works in “realtime-mode” now
    • new color-balancing options at the “Coloring”-tab
  • Flame-saving/flame-thumbnail-selection
    • new SaveAll-button which saves all selected flames into a single file (thanks to Michael Bourne for the suggestion)
    • new checkbox at each flame-thumbnail to (de)select it
    • new popup-menus at the flame-thumbnails (press the right mouse-button over a button to display the menu):
      • remove-button: new popup-menu to remove all or remove selected flames
      • checkbox (sometimes referred as “select-button”: new popoup-menu to toggle selection or deselect all
    • added confirmation dialog to the thumbnail-delete button
  • Background-gradients:
    • new 2×2 gradient-type for the background of fractals , may also be changed in “realtime mode”
    • new 2×2+c gradient-type for the background of fractals (which is the new default)
  • Mesh-Generator:
    • optional post-smooth (Taubin-smooth) in the mesh generator
    • removed the parameters “Thickness mod” and “Thickness samples” (just fix your model if is has “holes”) in the mesh generator
    • improved the rotation-behaviour of the mesh-preview in the Mesh-Generator
    • improved the heuristics to calculate “depth” when creating a mesh from a voxelstack
    • fixed (again) a serious bug in the Mesh-Generator: when rendering image-stacks
  • Misc:
    • new “Machine”-random-flame-generator
    • detect flames with invalid (xaos) settings and stop to render them
    • indicator-mode for adapative filtering (i. e. showing sharp/smooth regions)
    • fixed some labels which were not scale accordingly the global “tinaFontScale”-property
    • rearranged some controls at the coloring-tab
    • new variations, provided by Brad Stefanov (“waves2_radial”, “spliptic_bs”, “circlesplit”, “log_tile2”, “mobiq”, “tile_hlp”)
    • lots of new presets for the “isosfplot3d_wf”-variation, provided by Frank Baumann and Brad Stefanov
    • some performance increase on some of the DOF-blur-shapes
    • increased quality of DOF in 3D-mode, but needs much more time to compute
    • removed the color-oversampling/jittering-option

Just click the “Random flames” button to start playing around and have fun 🙂