Welcome to Fractal Forums

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 (http://www.megaupload.com/?d=SU2HM0QQ)
(3.32 Mb)

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

You know me...  Always a sucker for a fractal generator what plays with images!

I need time to fine tune an effort, but here is why you REALLY should consider building an animation (or batch processing?) feature into this fun little toy:

(http://s106.photobucket.com/albums/m278/sockratease/th_januslissa.gif)

BIG Version:  http://i106.photobucket.com/albums/m278/sockratease/januslissa.gif

Lots to explore in this program.  Thanks for sharing! 

I'll try to post a regular fractal from it later...  But I just can't help playing with images - call it a fetish.

that's some really nifty software :) the tree fractal is incredibly fun to play with, and is beautifully rendered - i'm using a geforce 8800gts with 16x antialiasing on, it's incredibly smooth and interactive.

gonna explore it some more now, just wanted to say gratz!

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!

Nice software.
I like looking at the patterns created by the trees.

I can only use it once in a rare while because my computer is a Linux OS.

I suppose I could try setting it up with WINE but that sounds too complicated.

Anyway it's still a really nice program. thanks.
 

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

virus safe  :evil1:

Seriously, I am impressed by it's speed of drawing.

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)

What a great prog. As others have said, love the speed and many fractal types.

Also, at last a program I don't have to install! I wish more progs could come in a single binary lump like this one.

Fantastic,look forward to having a play with this!

Heres something i created with it:
(http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs50/f/2009/333/a/d/We_Are_All_Made_of_Stars_by_Stumm47.jpg)

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

great , there goes another sea of time that I am short of already. Feeling like a authistic child  going nuts on this program. never seen anything this fast. . Is there any progres in developping?

Superb programs, congrats!!!

really nice, intuitive bit of kit!

wow! good things can come in small packages

Works fine in Linux under WINE :)

This is excelent! Thanks for bringing back this 3 years old post :D
And obviously thanks to the author, if he's still there... (is that Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in your profile picture?)

Thankyou, will give it a whirl!!

Tried it earlier and it's superb!!! Great for making mandala style sacred geometry images. If the author is still here thanks and if you are still developing it would be cool if you could change the output image size and move the image around easily within the window.

Many thanks!

Wow this post is old. I hope the author is still coding the program because it is really awesome.
There's just the "colouring the IFS" part of the program that should be continued. After all that's what we, as users, need to tinker in order to render pretty images.

Thanks anyway for that program.

The link went dead because police closed Megaupload could somebody copy his copy and upload his copy somewhere and post here the link ?

This was discussed in the moderators forum, and decided that posting links to re-hosted software can only be permitted on this forum with the consent of the original creator.

Has anyone tried to contact him?

If he wants, we can host it right here in our downloads section! 

It's freeware, I don't see why the author should be contacted, just give the proper credits to him in the download description.

It's not an easy call.

But it seems to me that regardless of price, distribution rights must be explicitly given or the assumption has to be no such rights exist.

Freeware is not the same as Open Source.  Copyrights still apply  (and even apply to Open Source too).

I seriously doubt it would be a problem, but I just don't want anybody assuming it's OK for them to redistribute, say, Mandelbulber or Mandelbulb3D or whatever they want, just because it is Freeware.

My reasoning is that if eNZedBlue popped in, and saw it re-hosted, there is a chance he'd be upset.

If he visits and sees us asking people to try and contact him first, I can't envision him being upset.

The rest of the world can do what they choose to do, we choose to err on the side of respecting Creator's Rights.

I'll repeat this, since it has not been addressed and is the single most important thing in the decision:  

Has anyone tried to contact eNZedBlue ?

i try to contact him/her

besides that, it is a matter of common decency, to at least inform the author...

yes but are cases as this where the author could not be contacted, and very relevant here has never put limit to the free distribution of his program ... i suppose he would be happy to know that still somebody use his program

We are trying to contact him.

Give it some time to work.  It's only been a few days!

As for "never put limit to the free distribution of his program" - distribution rights must be explicitly given or the assumption has to be no such rights exist.

Since you know that I guess it means you've made good use of the link that appeared temporarily...  ;D

Well that's your and the forum's official interpretation and I respect that but I personally think that if I give you something without attaching any restriction to it, then you're free to do whatever you like with it including giving it to someone else.

Surely you realize we must adopt that stance as a courtesy to all the programmers who post their work here.  I think making every effort to contact eNZedBlue is the ONLY legitimate first step.

Give that a week or two, then maybe we can discuss alternatives.

I shouldn't even say this - but if you're that impatient, this forum has no control over what you people do privately and off-site.  

However we must maintain our Professionalism in these matters.  

And where does that stop?

Did you ever put such limits on your gallery images?  How about your videos?

By your logic they could be fair game for other peoples projects if you never said not to use it.

It sets a poor standard of respect and we must be careful how we interpret such things.

This link may help

http://web.archive.org/web/20100527015721/http://www.enzedblue.com/JanusFractal/JanusFractal.html :) :) :)

The original author of the software appears to still be active on this forum about the occult: http://thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=28470&page=16 (http://thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=28470&page=16)

They credit themselves as 'Ahknaton' in the Janus Fractal about dialog (and also provide a link to this occult forum), and there is a user going by that name who posted recently in the page I have linked to above.

Since it seems that they have not responded to this thread since the download became officially unavailable, it might be a good idea to contact them through this other forum as they seem to be still active.  :)