Fyre, a tool for producing computational artwork from chaotic functions

[mouser]

Fyre is a tool for producing computational artwork based on histograms of iterated chaotic functions. At the moment, it implements the Peter de Jong map in a fixed-function pipeline with an interactive GTK+ frontend and a command line interface for easy and efficient rendering of high-resolution, high quality images.
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http://fyre.navi.cx/about.shtml

from freewareworldteam

[Eóin]

To give some background this type of fractal has been dubbed Flame Fractals. It is an evolution of more classic chaotic fractals such as the Sierpinski Triangle or Barnsley's Fern. It expands on these in two key ways, first it adds shading based on the log density of plots, secondly it adds trigonometric transformations on top of the linear ones.

This technique was apparently developed by Scott Draves of Cosmic Recursive Fractal Flames but popularized among fractal artists with the release of Apophysys. There are some really lovely examples to be found in the fractal sections of DeviantArt.

I'm a big fans of these fractals myself (obvious from the above ) and have written a renderer myself called Amethyst which I believe produces technically superior images through the use of anti-aliasing, but of course different people will have their own opinions on image quality. My work on this app has currently stalled. I finished the rendering DLL and started learning WTL to design the interface but got sidetracked. Just thought I'd let ye know .

[mouser]

awesome post Eóin,
this is why i love this place!

can't wait to see your work when you get restarted.. please keep us updated.

[nudone]

i look forward to a release version too, Eóin.

[Eóin]

Thanks, but it could be a while. Being honest my project is meant as an extension to Apophysis not a replacement. The idea was that you'd design your fractal in Apophysis as it is a really excellent tool for doing so (as is Fyre possibly, I hadn't heard of it before this so havn't tested it). Then you export the .flame file and load it into my app for rendering and output tweaking. At the end of the day though my renderer gets less and less special if you have enough RAM to throw at Apophysis as you just render a larger image and resize in any old app which will also get rid of the aliasing pretty well.

Also unfortunately I was overly ambitious with the project in the beginning, I made it completely modular so that people could rewrite the entire rendering process with plugins. I got it working but it feels a bit like a kludge, I'm sure all developers can empathize when have a program which works, but your still not happy with how it works.

I may yet go back to it, but my current project is happily occupying my time for the moment.

[f0dder]

Mmmh, neat program.

And nice to have you here Eóin, your math background rocks 

(Guinness guy, are you?)