a Functional User Interface for Texture Generation

What is FUI?
FUI is a program designed to plot mathematical functions in a quick, nice-looking way. Basically, it requires the user to enter a function and select a palette and it draws a graph of this function. In the current version, the function should return a value between zero and one, and this value is mapped into the color palette.
To see FUI in action look at the screenshots of FUI. You will find there some user interface screen shots as well as images exported by FUI.

The images created with FUI can be used in 3rd party applications such as 3D Studio MAX or Adobe Photoshop. The textures can be used to add variety to your texture database or images. The FUI-generated textures can be used to create logos such as the one above (the FUI-logo) and a multitude of other very interesting special effects.

For more information go to Reference. Note that some of the functions that you can enter are Noise-based fractals (cfbm is a fractal brownian motion function) and consequently textures like the one used for the FUI logo can be created.

Note that in the future, because of the behaviour of the people who host this site I might have to move somewhere lese. Also note that if this will happen these pages will contain links to the new site so you will not be left alone in the dark with no FUI support.

NEWS
April 18, 2002
The download link for the latest FUI version is no longer broken. Sorry for the inconvenience.

December 15, 2001
FUI 0.0.4.3 is available for download. This release contains a number of features that should make people who want to create TILEABLE PROCEDURAL TEXTURES happy:

• tnoise2(x, y, tilex, tiley) is a noise2 version which takes the output of noise2 and makes it tileable into the tilex x tiley rectangle. Note that tilex/tiley are constants.
• tcfbm2(x, y, freq, div, tilex, tiley) takes the output for the cfbm2 function and makes it tile into the given rectangle (exactly the same as tnoise2 does). Note that tilex/tiley are constants.
• tile(x, tilex) will take the value of x and normalize it to fit into a value from [0, 1]. It takes the "modulo" tilex value of x and then it divides it by tilex
• ctile(x, ctilex) is the same as tile but the "ctilex" argument is evaluated only once, hence it must be constant (a good idea would be using ctile when ctilex is simply a number)
  

This version of FUI actually features the SuperPIMP installer from Nullsoft to make life easier for not-so-advanced users. Unfortunately the file produced by SuperPIMP is an EXE file, and consequently I could not upload it to Geocities, which as some of you might have noticed, took off my website last month for "Excessive Traffiic". That basically means that I will have to move this page to some other place because the Geocities folks want to charge me for having this site.

Also another enhancement that will make a lot of users happy is the fact that the installer also contains the source code. Another thing that should be mentioned is that now when you press <ESC> FUI will NOTquit.

November 2, 2001
FUI 0.0.4.1 is available. The most important feature of this release is stability. Apparently the compiler replaces templates with macros, consequently the use of an internal variable in a templated function actually modified a private variable from the calling function, also the "static" keyword was removed from the "createX" functions. Also a new nice statusbar has been added, and the overall look has improved dramatically.

October 5, 2001
FUI is not dead.
FUI 0.0.4.0 Alpha is available for download. The highlights of this version are:

• Higher speed in calculation (improved performance) on the i686 architecture (Athlon, Pentium Pro/II/III/IV)
• A new "help as you type" which means that as you type you can see information about the current function which is at the cursor (i.e. if your cursor is over "mandelbrot" then you will get the help associated with the mandelbrot function)
• Statistical functions (these are not available in this 1st alpha version). Expect them in Alpha II.
• A new cool fractal-based function with a screenshot

June 30, 2001
FUI 0.0.3.2a is out. It's a pre-0.0.3.2 version that features a new syntax highlighting system. Grab it here.

June 29, 2001
I finaly managed to put together an example package for FUI. It includes:

• a classical Mandelbrot fractal
• a landscape map (i.e. heightmap)
• a very strange combination of Mandelbrot/FBM
• a Mandelbrot variation that can be used to generate the continents on a planet
• a few simple examples of basic functions

June 28, 2001
FUI 0.0.3.1 is finaly released. Only the EXE is released at this point due to the fact that it takes time to repackage everything.
New features/modifications:

• Stability has been greatly improved. FUI no longer crashes when an incorrect number of arguments is used for a function.
• The design of the dialog has been cleaned up.
• Tooltips have been added for most items on the dialog thanks to an article at CodeGuru.com
• When saving to a .fui file the following items are now saved in addition to the palette and the function iteself:
  • The position in the function
  • The pixel size
• Andrei posted an image he created in 3dsmax4 by using only FUI generated textures

June 26, 2001
I enabled a "guestbook" where you can state your opinion about FUI:
Sign Guestbook
View Guestbook

June 20, 2001
FUI 0.0.3.1 has not been released yet. The reason for this is that several changes occoured on the main development system (such as TWO OS changes from Win2K to RH7, hardware failures, hardware upgrades) which delayed the release. FUI 0.0.3.1 will be released at a later date.

May 30, 2001
New images added. Note that some not-so-classical fractals have been added into a new sections called FUI fractals. Those fractals were derived from the Mandelbrot/Julia set but the constand has been altered with a fractional brownian motion fractal, so actually the result is a fractal that is based on the output of another fractal. The results are pretty impressive, and they can be used to generate even planets.

Note that several other updates have been made to the Screenshots area. There have been added examples of terrains fully generated by FUI output (i.e. Bump Maps, Displacement Maps, Texture Maps) and also some abstract images have been added.

The estimated release date for FUI 0.0.3.1 is June the 2nd.

May 21, 2001
FUI 0.0.3.0 was released today.
New features in 0.0.3.0:

• a mandelbrot fractal function, mandelbrot options window added. the mandelbrot function now has two versions, one which is written completly in inline x86 assembly and one which is written in C++ using the STL (for portability purposes)
• a new zoom interface. now user can select the minimum and the maximum zoom level for the zoom slider
• a time editing area has been added
• user can edit the current time as well as the time delta (the rate with which the time increases)
• the 'browse' button now really works, so that exporting BMP files will be much easier
• "Export to a BMP file" added under "File" so that the process of exporting a BMP can be done not only in the FUI style but in the Windows style too
• removed a dead link to "Complex Transcendental Functions" which will be probably mirrored on this site sometime in the future
• the panning mode is now conformed to the Windows applications standard, that is a hand is displayed when the user can pan the function and the direction of the panning is now reversed
• because people tend to write quite large amounts of code in the "Function" area it has been expanded so it will be easier to read and edit long functions
• in the quickhelp editobox in the previous versions it was written "noise" instead of "noise2'. in 0.0.3.0 this is fixed
• the "screenshots" section of this site has been updated with images created solely by using FUI-generated procedural texture maps, bump map and displacement maps that have been combined and rendered with 3D Studio MAX. There are now two new sections of screenshots: Rendered and Weird
• of course, the function reference page has been updated accordingly
• the GPL file is now included with both FUI distributions and the CPP files have been modified according to the GPL

May 18, 2001
Today I implemented the Mandelbrot/Julia functions. "Real" fractals can now be generated with FUI. This will allow the user to use a wide variety of fractals, ranging from the fractional brownian motion fractals to the "classical" Mandelbrot and Julia. Consequently a new release - version 0.0.2.5 will be available for download on May the 20th.

A harsh implementation of Fuikido (the Borland C++ Builder version of FUI) shows a performance decrease of 50%. It seems that the Borland has a much worse optimizing compiler than Microsoft. FUI and Fuikido will be interoperable (that is they will be able to interchange graphtals) but FUI will be much faster, and also more spartan. Fuikido is designed to make the User's life much easier, but it seems that its performance will be a bit less impressive as FUI's. A preview version of Fuikido will be posted here soon. Note that Fuikido will probably be able to run on Linux after Borland releases their Linux version of BC++B.

May 15, 2001
I downloaded winelib and consequently i will try to get FUI compiled under Linux. Right now it works almost fine under Mandrake 8.0 with the following command line: wine fui.exe. Note that I had some problems when scrolling. I will try to get a Linux x86 binary and hopefully that problem will disapear. Also note that the tutorials now are updated with a comprehensive step-by-step tutorial that will teach you the basics of FUI and procedural texture generation. Note that I tested FUI on Windows XP Beta II (Server Edition/Pro) and it works fine.

May 11, 2001
Updated the screenshots section with some "new" outputs from version 0.0.2.0 that I didn't have the time to upload until today. I also finished my exams so now I can start working on FUI again. Do not expect updates too soon because I want to finish a mutation algorithm for textures first. The web page might be updated with a "developers" section for those who are interested in enhancing FUI.

May 3, 2001
New screenshots of the actual user interface. The screenshots were captured under Windows 2000 Pro (NT 5.0 Workstation) with WindowsBlinds running (hence the cool look of the windows). These screenshots also demonstrate the name of some graphtals (i.e. Scary Faces, etc.) by showing the interesting locations.

April 29, 2001
Alin helped me fix the Geocities Ad problem (when this page was loaded, due to a Geocities BUG two banners instead of one were displayed, which, of course was very annoying for visitors). Now the banners are completely hidden.

April 28, 2001
New site design. Plans for a new improved user interface (0.0.3.0) by May the 20th. There will be no updates until May the 10th due to an excessive number of finals that I have to take at university.