Fractal programming
These pages contain some ideas and sample programs for creating your own
fractal generators. They are mainly Mandelbrot set generators, for a couple
of reasons
-
The Mandelbrot is the simplest (hence fastest) iterated pixel by pixel
fractal to produce
-
The Mandelbrot set is nice - what, you're bored of it? WOW! You must have
a lot of patience...
-
Even seemingly totally different equations often produce images very similar
to Mandelbrot sets. Why? Indeed. Don't ask me.
Some of the ideas describe making the drawing process faster - even a modest
10% speed increase on an image which takes 10 hours to draw is an improvement
of an hour, which is a long time. Oh, and your computer is NEVER fast enough
for fractals. One of these C programs fired off on the fastest super computer
in the world will still slow it to a crawl once you really start zooming
in (which requires more itrations, hence computations, hence time). So
optimising the drawing process is very important when creating fractals.
Mandelbrot Set
Julia Set
Fractal Plants
No Frills Fractals (8k) Fractal generator in VB with source code. The techniques used in the code are described else where on these pages.