Fractals
Fractals, of course, are those amazingly intricate computer images you
see nearly everywhere these days. Equally or more fun than looking at
them, however, is generating your very own. If you have a PC computer
running MS-DOS or Windows, or a workstation with X-Windows, you are in
luck because you can run
Fractint
, which is a really
wonderful fractal generator, and places high I think among the most
amazing and fascinating programs of all time. It's incredibly
powerful, and offers endless fractal types and options and
customizations; you could spend years with this program and not even
explore all the menu options... ok, you get the idea. Curiously enough
it is also free.
Here are some images I made using Fractint (and in some cases, a raytracer):
- BGworlds Several traytraced, translucent, fractal-patterned spheres
- Sphere1 Fractal textures on a raytraced sphere
- 3 Planets Three planets among the stars. (yes, done entirely in Fractint)
- Fall Fern The classic fern shape in smoothed Autumn colors
- Tiles A simple two-color Penrose tiling, with edges rounded
- 3fold Wings A delicate wing pattern on black (1024x768)
- Icon2 Evinces a braided effect, more subtle colors
- Icon3 A round, rosy stained-glass window pattern
- Icon4 A high-res, zoomed in version (647k)
- Icon5 White-tipped waves chase around a ring (288k)
- jpb.par A few of the corresponding Fractint parameter-sets
mwaves.mpg fractal
animation of perturbed Mandelbrot set (loop, 2.4 meg).
Landscapes Fractal-generated and synthetically eroded landscapes
You can obtain the Fractint software from the
Fractint Home
Page
or from any self-respecting software
archive on the net, for instance the
Oakland MSDOS archives
for the DOS version. A very useful collection of information is available
in the
Fractal
FAQ at MIT. A treasure trove of all kinds
of fractal info and images is the Spanky archive in
Canada.
Personally I have been thinking about ways to generate fractals with
some degree of direct control over their geometry. The photo at the
top of this page is an example of my experimental "fractalizing"
process operating on a portrait of myself. It's actually a still from
a 100 frame fractal movie I made.
I wrote a brief explanation of the underlying idea.
If I ever get the program to do what I want, or clean it up a bit, I
might make the code available.
Graphics hotlist Fractal-related, rendering, and misc. resources
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