![]() ![]() ![]() It is my second-favourite program, but this may be because I am most familiar with it, having made more than 10,000 fractals using it. It has no help, but is easy to use (see my instructions). It has a rich array of filters that can completely change the look of the image. It has 117 built-in algorithms and you can easily specify your own. Produces a tremendous variety of rich images, with often spectacular colour. It was a great program in its time but is now something of a museum piece. It has good zooming-in controls (eg you can rotate the zoom window). It has many algorithms and you can generate your own, up to a point. The images look crude compared to 24-bit ones. Produces chunky or pontillist-looking ('dotty') images in at most 256 colours. Eight of the programs have been written by the amazing Stephen Ferguson. All programs except fractint produce 24-bit images. Here are my views on some of the programs I have tried. There are many high-quality freeware programs. Unless the program is streets ahead of the free fractal generators available, there seems little point in forking out money for it, though you may be willing to put up with being nagged to register. ![]() Thus a program that seems intuitive and easy to use to me may seem difficult to you, and vice versa. When we change to another program with a different user interface then this new program may initially appear 'difficult' to us. 'Easy to use' is hard to define since whatever we are used to appears easy and natural. It should be easy to use, intuitive and fast. (perhaps completely changing how the fractal looks) and other ways of manipulating the image.Ĥ) Utility. This includes colour alteration, the use of filters to produce different effects Mandelbrot set, we are likely to lose interest before long.ģ) The scope it gives for manipulating the images produced. Only available equation, even though this gives the incredibly rich The program should come with a fair number of built-inĪlgorithms, or else allow you to specify your own. It should produce a variety of colours and textures, as opposed to solid blocks of colour, dotty images, or silhouettes.Ģ) It should offer a variety of algorithms giving different types ofįractals. ![]() The program should create images whose colour varies continuously rather than discretely. No single image is likely to be that chromatically rich, but one of my Tierazon images has more than 400,000 colours. 24-bit colour allows one to generate up to 16 million different colours. It should use 24-bit colour (also called 'true colour') rather than 256 colours. (Hands up all those bored with the familiar Mandelbrot split circle.)ī) Richness of colour. Above all, it should let you create images that have complex and interesting structure, as opposed to random-looking blotches. The program should enable you to produce complex patterns with rich detail. This applies to two major aspects of the images: a) form and b) colour.Ī) Richness of form. I propose the following criteria, roughly in order of importance:ġ) The richness and complexity of the images one can produce with the program. So what distinguishes an excellent program from an average one? One may assume that all fractal generating programs give the user one or more algorithms, the capability to zoom in and to save images to disk. This page contains my recommendations and free program downloads both in the body and at the end. Of the two hundred or so programs that are available on the Net, I have used about 20 different ones, with varying degrees of success. The purpose of this write-up is to help people choose a fractal generating program so that they can make wonderful fractals. ![]()
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