Contour Palette Help Information

Pulling down this menu item opens
the Contour Palette.  The Contour
Palette gives you direct control
over coloration of your Mandelbrot
and Julia pictures.

Mandelbrot and Julia pictures can
take a long time to generate.  They
can also be difficult to color in
such a way as to make them look
pretty.  MandelVroom provides two
things that help alleviate these
problems.

First, MandelVroom allows you to
change color schemes and recolor
pictures while they are generating.
Second, MandelVroom gives you a
very flexible and powerful set of
tools for coloring your pictures.

MandelVroom treats a Mandelbrot or
Julia picture as a three
dimensional object.  Two of the
three dimensions are the familiar
horizontal and verticle dimesions
of your project's picture window.

You can think of the third
dimension as sticking straight out
of your monitor's screen.
MandelVroom treats this third
dimension as height or altitude.

The Contour Palette gives you a
configurable way of mapping the
third dimension (height) into color
in your project window.

Often, when map makers want to
represent our three dimesional world
on a two dimensional piece of paper,
they use color to represent height.
Map makers provide a key somewhere
on the map indicating which colors
represent specific ranges of
heights.

The Contour Palette is a user
configurable map key that defines
which altitiude ranges get mapped
into the colors available in the
Color Palette.

To get more specific help on the
Contour Palette, open the Contour
Palette, and then use the Help item
to get help with the Contour
Palette gadgets.

The user guide (MandelVroom.doc)
discusses contours and the three
dimensional aspects of MandelVroom
in greater detail.