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Isabel Walcott Hilborn and Supernova

I am extremely pleased to announce that Isabel Walcott Hilborn is working with me as my Business Manager. She is a godsend. It would be a great pleasure to celebrate her here in words, but to do the subject justice would require all night. She has me on a strict schedule, so you'll just have to wait :). In the meantime, I just want to put on the record that she is tremendously helpful, alert you to future announcements of her accomplishments, and note that even when I don't say anything, her handiwork is all over this place.

Just this weekend she interviewed me for the Supernova blog, and on her personal blog she explains what brought her here, and her take on my situation.

Thank you Isabel.

The Firebird in Center for Visual Music Screening in Philidelphia

The Center for Visual Music has curated The Firebird into Essential Visual Music: New Visions. It will be screened on Friday, May 30 at 7pm at International House in Philidelphia.

The Firebird is a 4:15 2400x2400 resolution Sheep sequence with original music by Kenji Williams, created for fulldome projection. It premiered at Dome Fest where it won two prizes, and then showed at Siggraph. The CVM program will show it in 4:3 at DVD resolution.

FLAM4: GPU Acceleration

I am very pleased to announce an alpha version of the fractal flame renderer is available that uses GPU acceleration. The code is under the GPL and can be downloaded from Sourceforge. Many thanks to Steve/Keldor for writing and releasing it! It uses DX10 shaders. I don't have Vista or any kind of Windows so i can't try it out myself, but i'm very excited about helping him develop it into a tool for all of us, and of course your input will be much appreciated too. Right now this is for developers rather than end users. If you try it out, please let me know what happens, good or bad.

FLAM3 v2.7.11 released

Download FLAM3 v2.7.11 here. The big news is support for 64 bits per pixel (16 bits per channel), doubling the color resolution. That means 65536 shades of gray instead of 256. This is intended to support external Tone Mapping algorithms, perhaps with qtpfsgui. This may be more useful with a low gamma setting. Change-log entry:

Added 16 bit per channel support to PNG via bpc envar. isaac.h is now installed with the flam3 headers. Strip indexing now done with size_t's to fix bug in large images (thanks Paul). Progress callback now returns ETA, and per-thread verbose flag functionality fixed. Enumerated spatial filter types now used in flam3.h, taking the place of function pointers (simplifies the API). Fix bug by moving precalculation of variation variables to flam3_iterate (thanks david).

and thanks erik! :)