Welcome to Fractal Forums

Hi There!

I've dabbled with fractals on and off since the late 1980's; when I first found some free fractal program from a magazine, that ran on my girlfriend's Commodore 64 and watched in amazement (over the course of several hours) as the monochrome screen was peppered with a handful of apparently random dots once every minute or two, from which these mystic patterns slowly emerged.

Since then, I've popped back every few years, to check for developments in the fractal scene; alighting on WinFract, ChaosPro, UltraFractal, Tierazon (the original), Apophosis along the way.  I never saved much of my work, until the last "fractal phase" and will have to see if I can find where I put the discs with the images.

Now I'm back again, having finally discovered the awesome Mandelbulb and related software just a couple of weeks ago.  I can't say I'm particularly good at maths, but love the creativity that fractals inspire and look forward to sharing the odd image / movie every now and then.  I must say I'm absolutely stunned by the latest developments in fractals, which take them into the stratosphere, if not outer space :joy:

Great forums, by the way - a truly valuable resource for the fractal community, on all levels. Well Done!

Welcome!  Like you, I dabbled before in other programs... But, ever since I found Mandelbulb 3D, I've been hooked!

I was just like you a few months ago, posting my first Meet & Greet.  And, now I can't stop...  :verysurprised:

Welcome to the forums and happy mandelbulbing!  :beer: :ugly:

Welcome to the domain of the fractaholics ;)
I've been one since April 1999 when I first played around with Fractint.
Interesting you mention "several hours" on the C64 - my latest program is "i.Candy" for the iPad/iPhone/iTouch that animates various (2D) Julia Sets in realtime including animation to sound/music (via microphone) - just submitted to the Apple AppStore so should be available within a week or so ($0.99).
(To anyone who knows about the earlier "free" Adware version (Free iCandy), this new one is vastly improved in particular with respect to the animation to music).

Thanks for the replies, chaps :)

It doesn't seem to matter what computer or software I use, it always takes several hours.  Or days :laugh:

i.Candy sounds cool, tho' - I'll recommend it to my friends who do have iPhones.

I know what you mean - usual problem, the complexity of the algorithms grows to fill available time and memory ;)
I am now working on a full shader 2 fractal interface allowing formula writers to do their own stuff, loosely based on Ultra Fractal but with specific formulas for 3D+ raytraced fractals and hopefully some other ideas that aren't easy to do in UF.

Thanks - I hope everyone likes i.Candy as much as I enjoy playing with it myself - in an update I will enable rendering to external displays so it could be used on big screens at discos etc.