Hi all,

I've written a simple fractal program as a hobby project, and I'm releasing it as freeware. The program is called "Janus Fractal", and it lets you create Iterated Function System fractals and manipulate them interactively. It uses a texture feedback algorithm: each frame, it renders the fractal to a bitmap image in memory, and then the next frame it uses a copy of the previous frame as input for that one, scaling it down, applying rotations and other transformations and so on. It's all done with software rendering, no 3D hardware acceleration for the time being.

There are 6 fractal types implemented: Julia fractals (these are not IFS fractals, but you can render them with texture feedback, so I threw them in), Tree fractals, Spirals, "n-around-1" fractals, L- Systems and 3D IFS fractals.

You can load various pre-made fractals using "File->Quick Load Fractal", then use a combo-box and slider bar to edit fractal parameters, or drag blue "hotpoints" around to edit the fractal interactively. The type of fractal is selected from the "Transform (X)" menu and the various components of the fractal motif are selected from "Generator (Y)". Rendering options (colouring, blur, HDR etc) are in the Options menu. Help -> Show Keymappings shows keyboard shortcuts.

There is an HTML manual that comes with it that you can pull up from the Help menu (or open it from the Manual folder).

Here are some links to download it (for Windows only at the moment):

Janus Fractal v1.111 (.rar file): http://www.megaupload.com/?d=SU2HM0QQ
(3.32 Mb)

Janus Fractal v1.111 (.zip file): http://www.megaupload.com/?d=WX2NLNXV
(4.79 Mb)

This is the first release, at some point in the future I hope to add more features like zooming, more flexible L-System specification and so on.

Chris

Yes, I'm putting animations on my "to do" list for future versions. It will probably only support interpolating between the same fractal type. Nice animating gif
You're welcome.
At the moment it's not using any graphics hardware accelerator features, because I didn't want to have to worry about detecting what pixel shader version people had and all those headaches. It also uses a 16-bit palettized mode with a 24-bit palette (this makes it easier to have large pallettes for gradients for the Julias, and interpolate a single index value rather than RGB separately), but this isn't supported by graphics cards, so I convert via software to 24-bit 1024 x 1024 texture at the end. In the next version I'll probably make this an Open GL texture so I can use the graphics card to apply post-processing effects, but right now it's just copying the image to a Windows GDI bitmap to display it.
No problem!

I love this program (see avatar)!! Many thanks!!!! Can't wait to read the manual (book!) and figure it out some more!

oooeee just to let ya know I'm running Linux Mint (Debian-Ubuntu distro family) and all I had to to is unzip to my hard drive and open the program ... oooeee ... thank you a new toy (big smile) ... off to play a little (big smile)

so for all you linux users out there it works fine under wine (big smile)

owlspook

ps. I'm passing the link to the program to my other fractal loving friends ... your program is a keeper (big smile)

Fantastic,look forward to having a play with this!

Great little toy
I just miss zoom right now But you said, you're working on it, so that's fine

Superb programs, congrats!!!

wow! good things can come in small packages