Back in 2002 I though to extend the idea of orbit traps for coloring fractals so I wasn't restricted only to geometrical figures. My first idea was to "draw" the trapping area into a bitmap, and lookup in the bitmap for every point of the orbit to see if there was a "hit" or not.
![](bittrap_00.jpg)
Coloring with bitmap orbit traps, made in 2002 - Click image to enlarge
The image above made it into the first position of the National Fractal Art Contest of 2002 in Spain (click here for the results). The pink-bunny image belongs to Made, the demoscene graphician.
The second idea was to do orbit traps with real distances to the trap. For that to work I made a black and white image with the trap area in black, and then for every white pixel I computed the distance to the closest black pixel. The resulting grey-scale image encoded the 2D distance field that I could use as true replacement for geometric traps in the regular orbit trap algorithm:
![](bittrap_01.png)
The input trap image
![](bittrap_02.png)
Precomputed distance field
![](bittrap_03.jpg)
Resulting image
An example of basic in/out trap algorithm can be found here:
![](bittrap_00.jpg)
Coloring with bitmap orbit traps, made in 2002 - Click image to enlarge
The image above made it into the first position of the National Fractal Art Contest of 2002 in Spain (click here for the results). The pink-bunny image belongs to Made, the demoscene graphician.
The second idea was to do orbit traps with real distances to the trap. For that to work I made a black and white image with the trap area in black, and then for every white pixel I computed the distance to the closest black pixel. The resulting grey-scale image encoded the 2D distance field that I could use as true replacement for geometric traps in the regular orbit trap algorithm:
![](bittrap_01.png)
The input trap image
![](bittrap_02.png)
Precomputed distance field
![](bittrap_03.jpg)
Resulting image
An example of basic in/out trap algorithm can be found here: