Mandelbulb3D/Reference/Viewing and Image

Viewing and Image Settings

The Viewing and Image settings on the Top Toolbar determine the resolution of the calculated image, the resolution of the displayed image, and the resolution of the image saved to disk.

Image Width and Height

The Image section sets the resolution, or pixel dimensions, for rendering. Choose a resolution for image calculation with the Width and Height fields.

Mandelbulb3D is a 32-bit application, which means it can only access 3 gigabytes of system memory. This RAM limit imposes a limit on the resolution of rendered images. The limit varies depending on the complexity of the scene, but in general Mandelbulb3D can't render images greater than 10,000 pixels on a side (10K).

Higher resolution output is possible with the Big Renders window. The high resolution image is divided into smaller tiles that can fit into system memory, and rendered in series. Render tiles need to be stitched together in an image manipulation application.

Aspect Ratio

If the Keep Aspect checkbox is enabled, then the image aspect ratio is preserved. When the user changes either Width or Height, the other dimension is adjusted automatically to preserve the ratio of Width to Height. Disable Keep Aspect to change the proportion of the rectangle.

Three buttons on the right labeled Aspect provide access to aspect ratio presets: 4:3, 5:3, and User. The first two ratios are fixed. To define a User aspect, right-click the button. In the User Defined Aspect Ratio pop-up windows, enter the Width and Height of the desired aspect. Only integer values are permitted. For the HDTV ratio of 1.778:1, this is easily entered as 16:9. For cinematic aspect ratios, which are not low whole number ratios, it's OK to enter pixel values, even if these don't represent the final delivery resolution. For example, the standard cinematic aspect can be entered as 3996:2160, and widescreen 2.39:1 can be entered as 4096:1716. These values will be cropped on the User button, because they are too long to fit in the area of the button.

Scale

The up and down facing arrows labeled Scale multiply or divide the Width and Height by a value of two. The up arrow doubles the Width and Height. The down arrow divides the Width and Height by two.

DE Stop + C

The DE Stop + C checkbox is enabled by default to ensure consistency in Distance Estimation renderings when output resolution is changed. Distance Estimation is resolution dependent. The DE Stop parameter in the Calculation tab must be adjusted proportionally to any change to Image Width or Height. DE Stop + C makes that adjustment automatic. If DE Stop + C is disabled, changes to the Image Width or Height may alter the rendering significantly.

Depth of Field, found in the Postprocess window, is also resolution dependent. The Clipping Radius field sets a maximum blur radius, expressed in pixels. DE Stop + C also scales the Clipping Radius to maintain visual consistency at different render resolutions.

Viewing

The Viewing buttons scale the image displayed in the center pane of the Main Window. In the default state, the image is displayed at the rendered Image Width and Height, and the Viewing field shows a ratio of 1:1.

Click the down arrow to reduce the size of the displayed image by a factor of one. The image is displayed at half resolution, and the Viewing field shows a ratio of 1:2. Each click of the down arrow reduces the size of the image, to ratios of 1:3, 1:4, etc. Click the up arrow to increase the size of the displayed image by a factor of one.

Images saved from the Save Pic tab are stored at the display resolution. If the Viewing field shows a ratio of 1:2, then the saved image will be half of the resolution of the original rendering. If this is the case, or if the ratio is 1:3, then Mandelbulb3D saves the image with optional Sharpening, to recover some of the detail lost from downsampling the image.

Many users choose to save at a Viewing ratio of 1:1, the full resolution of the rendering. Downsampling for anti-aliasing is then done in an image editing or compositing application. This gives more control over the final result.