Buddhabrot

A Buddhabrot image generator.

Principle

The Buddhabrot is yet another way of turning the well-known Mandelbrot set into pretty pictures. Here is a good description by Paul Bourke.

One of the pioneers of this technique was Melinda Green.

This program focuses on rendering Buddhabrot images as described by Johann Korndoerfer.

Usage

The buddhabrot program accepts several commands, each has specific options:

• compute samples a number of random points in the complex plane, and selects those for which the suite is known to diverge after a number of iterations comprised between a minimum and a maximum value. The selected points are saved in a document in JSON format.
• render reads the output of compute and renders a PNG image.
• showcells generates an animated GIF that shows to the developer (or the curious user) the set of "cells" in the complex plane where points are picked. These cells are chosen to overlap the border of the Mandelbrot set.

All commands list their options with --help.

Examples:

$ buddhabrot compute
Sampling 300K points...
Selected cells: 67315
Writing cache /tmp/buddhabrot-300K-100K_200K.bbc ...
Done!

$ buddhabrot render -c /tmp/buddhabrot-300K-100K_200K.bbc
Loading cache /tmp/buddhabrot-300K-100K_200K.bbc ...
selected points: 40
done plotting
img points: 5472163
value range: 0-9447
Writing /tmp/buddhabrot-300K-100K_200K.bbc.png ...
Done!