Apophysis: 3D inside

At last, I have time to shed some light on...


Before I say anything, I have to remind you that this is still a very quick hack, that is: it is quite ugly and unoptimized, and etc... It is quite stable though, unlike some other recently added features

Well, getting to the point. Do you remember the "perspective" variation? It was created with the "3D idea" in mind - if we put it as a final xform, the result will look like it is rotated in 3D... But the fractal itself is still quite flat. So, if somehow we could add a "z" coordinate to the fractal points... And then take this coordinate into account in the "perspective" view... Well, that's what I did

So, what you see on the picture is actually a simple projection of 3D-fractal onto a 2D screen without (unfortunately) any checking for occluded points or anything like that...

Another problem here is the user interface - the "triangles" work only in 2D, so I had to add a couple of variations just to do the linear transformation of the "z" axis... Believe me, working on something this way is really not so comfortable
I also tried to make some "real 3D" variations too, but it turned out that using them might be more difficult than usual - because of the 3rd dimension

Oh, and I forgot to say that even if we won't use the third "z" coordinate, the renderer still got to remember about it, move it from one place to another and ect., so rendering in this version will be a bit slower...

Well, you might have guessed by now, that I'm saying all this to explain why this 3D stuff should not go into the official Apophysis branch
Still, this doesn't mean we can't release it as an "unofficial" Apo version At least this one could be meaningfully called like "version 2.06+Z"

(and we just hoped to end this multi-version madness by adding the plugin system... oh no... )