July 26, 2004

Cool Fractals

I just downloaded a trial version of Ultra Fractal 3. Why? I happened upon it and I can't remember how.

It's written in Delphi, of all things, and I must admit I'm impressed by the feature set. The programmer basically created a fractal program that does everything you would expect a fractal program to ever do. From a high level, the Ultra Fractal 3 has these impressive features:

  • Renders fractals in true color.
  • Renders fractals on layers, which can be freely mixed.
  • Renders to PNG, Adobe Photoshop native format (for layers), JPEG, etc..
  • Renders fractals based on user-defined formulas, including a bunch of pre-made formulas.
  • Connects to a user-formula site on the Internet and can download new formulas on the fly.
  • Distributes fractal rendering using a Ultra Fractal Server process that can be placed on machine on your network.
  • Complete control over color gradient, layer transparency, zooming (up to 1040000!), and lots more

So, what's the big deal? Check out what the community has produced:

 

After googling further, I was more and more amazed.

From what I understand, fractals are created by testing whether an arbitrary point satisifies an equation. I think this means whether a point is within the set or outside of the set. It's possible that the first test is indeterminate, so a more precise test is performed. This subsequent test can also be indeterminate and the process continues until the point is found to be in or out of the set (satisfying the equation, or whatever). Depending on how many increasingly precise iterations are performed, the color is defined within a gradient spectrum.

I've seen ray traces that used each iteration as an elevation point and some spectacular results have been produced. Here are a few images I found on the web:


(written with POV ray tracer)

Then you can get really crazy with something called Quaternions, which are more sophisticated than simple height-models like I described above. Check this out

Check out these videos and this amazing gallery.

 

Posted by Nick Codignotto at July 26, 2004 11:09 PM
Posted to General
Comments

Hey. Check out this holy grail of fractal indices, that links to a lot of awesome pages: http://www.fractalus.com/cgi-bin/glist

Posted by: timb at August 16, 2004 06:32 PM
Post a comment









Remember personal info?






Valid XHTML 1.0!   Valid CSS!