END OF AN ERA, FRACTALFORUMS.COM IS CONTINUED ON FRACTALFORUMS.ORG

From the absence of response, I'm thinking that everyone is already a happy user of Apophysis or mandelbulber, is that right? I haven't tried using them yet; I guess I should. I don't implement the "flame" algorithm per se, but I think the approach I use should have some computational advantages [hence why it works adequately in the browser.] It was fun making a version of these things using html5 and maybe it will be useful for sharing with people less inclined to install software as browsers get better.

Thank you Sockratease. It is a bit of a toy, to be sure, for a professional graphic artist. As for saving, it does at least let you export the spec's of your animation (in a JSON format), with the idea that these could be archived (for now, by emailing it to me, later via some cgi) to make it into a gallery of sorts.

For example, this is the code for one for one of the animations provided, which animates a modified Sierpinski triangle. The first row of the "allist" shows the structure of the first frame:
  the usual 3 affine maps: [0.5,0,0,0.5,0,0],[0.5,0,0,0.5,0.5,0],[0.5,0,0,0.5,0,0.5]
  plus a fourth affine map which goes in the middle:  [-0.1,0,0,-0.1,0.4,0.4].
Subsequent frames follow.

{"title":"Triangles1",
  "alist":[
  [[0.5,0,0,0.5,0,0],[0.5,0,0,0.5,0.5,0],[0.5,0,0,0.5,0,0.5],[-0.1,0,0,-0.1,0.4,0.4]],
  [[0.5789839546940135,0,0,0.5789839546940135,-0.0403199371822964,-0.0277657135897324],[0.3940940187231701,-0.307717247496174,0.307717247496174,0.3940940187231701,0.6418458838888825,-0.07880981885422134],[0.5,0,0,0.5,0,0.5],[-0.15018034210787964,0,0,-0.15018034210787964,0.8229617521936365,0.8239996617330558]],
  [[0.5,0,0,0.5,0,0],[0.5,0,0,0.5,0.5,0],[0.5,0,0,0.5,0,0.5],[-0.1,0,0,-0.1,0.4,0.4]],
  [[0.5,0,0,0.5,0,0],[0.5,0,0,0.5,0.5,0],[0.5,0,0,0.5,0,0.5],[-0.5,0,0,-0.5,0.5,0.5]],
  [[0.5,0,0,0.5,0,0],[0.5,0,0,0.5,0.5,0],[0.5,0,0,0.5,0,0.5],[0,-0.5,0.5,0,1,0.5]],
  [[0.5,0,0,0.5,0,0],[0.5,0,0,0.5,0.5,0],[0.5,0,0,0.5,0,0.5],[0.5,0,0,0.5,0.5,0.5]],
  [[0.5,0,0,0.5,0,0],[0.5,0,0,0.5,0.5,0],[0.5,0,0,0.5,0,0.5],[0,0.5,0.5,0,0.5,0.5]]
 ],
  "va":[480,0,0,-480,60,540],
  "word_length":7,
  "level_max":20,
  "rect_size":1
  }

More rotation animation is a good thing!

@ Sockratease: Thanks again for the comments. Hopefully Firefox will get faster. Your points are well taken; another textual output format would be easy enough, but for real video output I'd probably have to run the computation on the server, which runs contrary to my purposes. I'd have to disagree about the portability, though: it works as is on Macs, PCs, Linuxes, and my iPod (anything you can port an html5 browser to). Indeed, if you wanted, you have my permission to copy the files to your computer an run it locally, say under a locally compiled version of webkit, but obviously that's not really the nature of your concern.

@Wall En Taoed: What do you mean about rotation animation? Do you mean the rotations in, say, the Random Dragon? Or do you mean on the showcase page?: www.stanford.edu/~mcoram/ifs_showcase.html

@Bent-Winged Angel: ? In FAW webpage the morphing is done by linearly interpolating the affine maps. I've thought of doing a more geodesic transition path (e.g. take the matrix logarithm of A * B^(-1), and take small steps along the path of the exponential map), but haven't gotten around to implementing such matrix calculations in javascript. I'd be glad to see a write-up of how other software does this. I'm not sure if this addresses your concerns, though.