It has been quite a while since the last update to Fragmentarium, but I finally managed to find some time for creating a new release, which indeed is the first release stable enough to qualify as a version “1.0”.

Major changes

The Fragmentarium UI has been somewhat redesigned in order to simplify it.

Now there are only two modes:

• Progressive, for creating accumulated images (using multiple samples per pixels). An uniform named ‘subframe’ keeps track of the current frame (and replaces the old ‘backbufferCounter’ uniform).
• Animation, where a single ‘time’ uniform can be used to control dynamics.

The buffer size no longer needs to be locked to the window size, although it is possible to do so. This means, that it is now possible to work with buffers with different aspect ratio and size than the OpenGL window – something several people had requested.

The old ‘Animation Controller’ window is gone. Instead, the time variable may be controlled by a new slider in the main UI. In order the render animation frames, the new ‘High Resolution and Animation Render’ window must be used:

As can be seen, it is now possible to render animations at arbitrary resolution and using multiple subframes. There is also a progress dialog making it possible to actually stop the renders.

The code has also been cleaned up. The prefered build environment is now Qt Creator 2.7 together with Qt 4.8.5 (a project file has been added), though the old VS2008 project has been updated and is working as well (and the Debug configuration now works).

Other changes

• A “brute-force” raytracer has been added, to render fractals where a distance estimator can not be found.
• Tile rendering now has added padding option, which can be useful when using screen space methods.
• New sigmoid tone mapper.
• IBL raytracer can now rotate maps.

Bug fixes

• No more mip-maps for non-HDR textures.
• Fixed some texture caching bugs.
• And several other minor fixes.

Where to get it

The latest build can be downloaded here (Windows only):
Fragmentarium-Windows-v1.0.0.zip

Mac and Linux users have to download and build from the source tree:
Fragmentarium at GitHub