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The Fractal Appreciation Society
Richard Lyall
Posts: 1,212 mod
Over in the Free Software Thread, I shared a piece of free software called Chaotica for creating amazing flame fractals. Seems like @Jeff has caught the bug already 
So why not swing over to https://www.chaoticafractals.com/, get creating, and post your results here? You can also post the .chaos file (or the contents anyway) which allow others to recreate your fractals.
Here are a couple to whet your appetite:
Processing Core
Power Surge
Hall of Mirrors
7
Comments
Here's a repost of some of my creations.
Neurons
Who4
Book of Souls
Oh gawwwd, am I going to be in the fractal death grip if I download this?? They are so addictive. I had a fractal period a few years ago where I just couldn't turn away from the screen once I started fiddling with them. Ugh.....
@Richard Lyall and @Jeff these look awesome and so much fun!!
Come on in, the water's lovely
Teaser! I already know I'll drown 🌊 but what the heck, downloading it now 😳
Here we go, just on the fly. Will have to check Chaotica out a little more to figure out the inner workings.
spacegarden
Blood Stones
Moon Stone
Escher Spirals
Both this one, and the two stone ones were based on some of the examples supplied with Chaotica. Go to File | Browse Examples - great starting points to play with.
@Richard Lyall ooh, I love the Escher Spirals! Because the colours can be so vivid with fractals, somehow changing to B&W never occurred to me. But these have so much depth, it really works well!
I use J-Wildfire. http://www.jwildfire.org/
Thanks Richard, flame fractal generation is plentiful on the PC, but (AFAIK) much less so on the Mac. Will definitely check it out. Must be 15+ years since I played with this. Low res renders would take hours.
Today, I can fly through high res, real-time animated fractals on the iPad. For us fractal nerds on iOS, check out Frax.
Frax is one of my favourite apps!
Awesome...didn’t know about this one! Off to play ...
Installed "chaotica" today - really fun. It seems like it has taken a lot of design concepts from FraxFlame that came with one of the KPT bundles way back. It is a somewhat complex interface to navigate, and I'm sure I have only scratched the surface. Render times are still significant, even with our new machines.
It produces beautiful files, and given the content, they do scale up in Photoshop quite nicely. Thanks for the tip @Richard Lyall !
The full license isn't cheap, but I am considering it...
Chaotica is based on an old freeware app called Apophysis which sadly isn’t under development any more. I eventually bought the middle license for Chaotica to be able to do bigger renders.
Apophysis died? Aww I loved that software. I moved to Linux and lost track of it.
I looked into Apophysis the other day after the Chaotica discussion, and it seems it hasn’t been developed since about 2012. There was a 64 bit version called Apophysis 7x by a guy called Xyrus from around then but I found it was quite unstable when I tried it again a few days back. Shame, but that’s freeware/open source for you I guess.
I ended up buying the top version as I have plans for getting a really large print done on either acrylic or metal to hang on the wall.
Wow @Richard Lyall I think this is my favourite so far! Along with your "processing core" and "book of souls" by @Jeff
I'm going to try and hold off getting sucked into making some of these, as I've been distracted enough this past month as it is!
You know resistance is futile, right?
Definitely. I'm finding I crank out 4 or 5 new pieces every night at the moment!
Flux Capacitor
Post away!
Discography
OK, I find I am producing in two main areas, the 'rhythmic' and the 'abstract'. The 'rhythmic' is more repeating patterns, the 'abstract' are wierd but artistic creations which don't look like fractals as a whole but in my mind produce images I really like and which are more like modern art...
So let's start with a few 'rhythmic'.
Jellyfish
UFO
Web of Souls
Coronate
@Jeff Nice. I'm enjoying UFO in particular.
This is great... I'll email you with a couple of mine, and I'm curious to see how you achieved the UFO one - would you be happy to share the file for rhst one?
I'm starting to get a feel for what some of the individual transforms look like, so hopefully this is a stage on the way to being able to construct them myself rather than just tweaking.
@Jeff, I really like that jellyfish, amazing constructed texture. Really need to find more time to play with these.
As a FYI, I find that if you render at a high quality setting and with good anti-aliasing, these files are well suited for upscaling in Photoshop. For max quality, you want to render big of course, but 2x or 4x resampling in PS works pretty well too. (Not to mention WAY faster.)
Happy to share UFO with you.
I found a link somewhere with a PDF for Apophysis which gave diagrams and explanations for many of the transforms seen in Chaotica. If I cannot find the link again will pass on that doc as well.
Thanks. Interesting what yourself and Richard are liking. My favourite out of those four was Coronate.
Here are a few of what I call 'abstract'. I think these are interesting as 'art' and some of them would be difficult to tell that that originated as some form of fractal.
Out of the Blue
Rock Lobster (Van Gogh)
Smokesphere
Creation
That would be great thanks!
Liking Out of the Blue particularly this time.