Welcome to Fractal Forums

This software renders Iterated Function System (IFS) animations in real time in your web browser
   http://www.stanford.edu/~mcoram/ifs.html
There's nothing to download; however, a modern browser like Chrome/Safari/Opera is needed for it to work well. Firefox is a bit slow for some reason and Internet explorer doesn't work at all.
You can edit the animations sequences right in the browser, by just selecting a frame and choosing transformations to apply. Drag to manipulate them.

For speed it uses either of two tricks: de Bruijn sequences to select a sequence of mappings or in "Crystal" mode, it uses the native image transformations enabled on the html5 canvas.
Some of the prettier animations are "Fern Deconstruction" in Crystal mode, or "Dragons3" or "Triangles1" in either Crystal or de Bruijn animation modes.

If you try it and have any feedback, I'd be happy to know. Also, if you make an animation, mail me the code for it (copied from the textarea on the page) and I'll add it to the animation menu.

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.

I've been sick, and haven't had time to look at this, but I think the prevailing sentiment is not to have an online only toy - unless the output can be saved to the remote machine.

I use neither Apophysis nor Mandelbulber very much (more of a Chaoscope and Mandelbulb 3D user).  In fact, I do nearly all of my fractal work on a computer that NEVER goes online, and has had all it's security and other background processes stripped to enhance performance!  So an online only tool has no appeal for me.  

I know if I did something nice on such a toy, and could not even save it to my computer for use in other projects it would be frustrating.

I'll have a look at it when I get over this illness and post some feedback...

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
  }

I do some pro graphics art work, and call all my tools "toys" - even things like pixelmator  (a poor man's photoshop) and I certainly think of every fractal generator I have ever seen as a toy!

I play with them, and have fun, so they are toys.

You should consider some sort of way to allow saving output as either an image sequence, video file, or even swf animation.  Otherwise it's appeal will be minimal at best.

I never heard of the JSON format, and without some more universal format for saving our efforts such that they can be used and viewed by their creators on their own offline systems...  I don't see this project having much success.   :sick:

Another drawback that may need to be addressed is the fact that many people only use firefox, and you yourself state that it performs poorly on the single best and most secure browser out there  (of course that's my own opinion).

I had a look, and you were right.

It does struggle on firefox.

I think it's a noble effort, but it's just not suited for my way of doing things.

I'd like to see something similar made in a more portable format, like Java maybe?  Endlos is a fine fractal generator distributed as a .jar file.  That make it one of the few cross-platform toys out there.  I use it on both my windows systems and my mac as well!

You did a fine job of coding, but missed the target in terms of what users (at least users like me) want out of a fractal generator.  With over 600 fractal generators to compete with, you need to do something special to stand out and draw a following  O0
 

More rotation animation is a good thing! :dink:

I just discovered this post!  i have been playing with rotation animation for a bit now with Fractal Explorer.  Having problems with the evolution/morphing part. :angry:

@ 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.

PS. I think the performance in Firefox 4 is now quite good.