Welcome to Fractal Forums

Hi everyone, I'm Jase, the site's creator, here is a little about myself.

I am married with two daughters and I am a software developer by trade - I have been developing software professionally for over 10 years now.

I have a fascination with Fractals - how exactly do you describe 'infinitely complex' to someone?  Seeing and exploring fractals such as the classic Mandelbrot set is fascinating stuff - and it sucks you in and gets you hooked.  I can't say that I'm good at Maths, although I do like applying mathematics to solve problems. 

My passion on this site is to bring people together to share views; ideas and experiences.  It would be fantastic if someday a groundbreaking fractal discovery was made on this site.  Until then I hope that all FractalForum.com site users interact and have fun and really gain something from the site.  So far I have found a few very talented individuals who also care passionately about sharing knowledge and am enthused that we can get a good community established here.

Great idea "Fractal Forums".

All the best!

It is good to see the birth of a site that covers the fractal world, hopefully above and beyond just the art we see posted about here and there.  Thanks for taking the effort to start this up and I for one am looking forward to a lot of activity here!

Excellent! Spread the word and we will grow.

Hi Jase,

So nice to "meet" you. Thanks for starting a real, honest to goodness fractal community. Best of luck to you, and thanks for inviting me. I look foward to seeing your work. :)

What are ALL of the fractal generators that you have used ??

Which one have you used the most ??

How long have you been creating your own fractals ??
 

Hi I've used Ultrafractal, Fractal Extreme and Chaospro are the main ones.. I remember ChaosPro back on the Amiga! I'm showing my age.  Also like many fractaleers I've written my own code to display fractals - one crazy example was on a BBC micro with 16 colour screens, it took a day to render the mandelbrot set!

I have tried to grapple with FractInt on a 386?486? back in the days too, but the lack of a decent graphics card stopped me going any further with that one.

Fractal Extreme is possibly my favourite at the moment because I am trying to put together some zoom animations for a DVD.  Why didn't anyone before ever think of the clever way FX does its zooms?   Yes I know FX is very very simple compared to Ultrafractal etc but there's a saying which sums up my appreciation of it - "it just gets the job done"!

I use the Fractal Imaginator (Fi) because that is the only one suitable for Science Research.

It was specially programmed by Terry W. Gintz, including features in QuasZ.

You cannot be that old.  I imagine that you were probably born around 1973.  I, on the otherhand, had already graduated from college, getting married, and a son on the way.


What languages have used for your own fractal generators ??


Yes, it has been one of the better applications for exploring and creating animations.  I have seen many fantastic zooms that people have made using this program.
 

I used 'C' and various flavours of Basic.  Although I'd be tempted to say if you really want to push the speed envelope you need to be programming the FPU directly.

I would look forward to GPU power being put to rendering fractal use.  On a related topic, the Folding group at Stanford has just released GPU clients for their protein folding software (which is heavy on matrix calculations) so it would just take an entrepreneureal fellow to build a Mandelbrot for GPU application.  Hey you might even be able to get real time zooming especially if combined with the algorithm Fractal Extreme uses.