Sorry about the image size, fractals compress badly (even with pngcrush on brute). Fractal art is something I've been exploring for years, but since my switch to Linux, I've found it difficult to...
Sorry about the image size, fractals compress badly (even with pngcrush on brute).
Fractal art is something I've been exploring for years, but since my switch to Linux, I've found it difficult to get a piece I find satisfying.
This one is close, hence the post.
The flam3 specification that most fractal exploration programs are based around, are insane. They expect you to fully understand the mathematics, and the flam3 program itself has a horrendous number of strange and mutually exclusive commandline flags.
So, most people use a program that does the heavy lifting for them.
On Windows, for a long time, Apophysis was king. A huge number of scripts were written for it, and a large number of hacks (dll injection and the like), as well. Which has resulted in some amazing artwork on DeviantArt and other places.
However, running Apophysis on Wine (because the Linux fork was abandoned a long time ago), sucks. Many of the hacks to improve the program (because it is nearly unmaintained), don't work as Wine doesn't have some of the strange backwards-compatibility binary hacks that Windows does.
I found Fractal Explorer to be awful, and GIMP's fractal explorer is incredibly basic, requiring huge amounts of scripting (Script-Fu) to bring up to a decent level.
However, I may have found something decent!
The linked image was generated using GIMP for some showy stuff, but mostly Mandelbulber2, which is multi-threaded, includes ray-tracing and proper 3D camera work, ambient occlusion, HDR and can connect to a render-farm to offload work.
I also used to use Apophysis (later the 7x variant) but ran into the same compatibility/linux issues you mentioned. I did some looking around and found JWildfire to be pretty nice (and much more...
I also used to use Apophysis (later the 7x variant) but ran into the same compatibility/linux issues you mentioned. I did some looking around and found JWildfire to be pretty nice (and much more portable), though I never spent as much time in it as I did Apophysis.
The only 3D work I ever did was all in Incendia, which was a great program but is Windows only and I've never tried to run it in Linux.
I was aware of Mandelbulber, but kind of bounced off the interface the first few times I tried it, nice to see that the project is still running!
I also still pop open xaos sometimes just for fun...
Mandelbulber and Mandelbulber2 are very different products, thankfully. (2 is a ground-up rewrite, focused on UI.) The new UI is fairly intuitive, focused on controlling the camera in 3D space,...
Mandelbulber and Mandelbulber2 are very different products, thankfully. (2 is a ground-up rewrite, focused on UI.)
The new UI is fairly intuitive, focused on controlling the camera in 3D space, and giving the user a preview of their work. So the expected workflow is kinda seed flame->adjust flame->move and focus camera on interesting area->render.
You can still reseed and run adjustments, but it's a smaller part of the UI, that's all.
Wine's AppHQ tells me the EX line of Incendia works brilliantly, and Wine supports multi-threading fairly well (well, multiple perfect test scores), so it may just work out-of-box.
I'm not so tempted when they're selling the mesh generators separately though.
I have only ever explored Fractals purely for fun, so your suggestions are probably way better than mine. However I have had fun in the past using Fractal Lab, which is a pretty neat browser-based...
I have only ever explored Fractals purely for fun, so your suggestions are probably way better than mine. However I have had fun in the past using Fractal Lab, which is a pretty neat browser-based generator/explorer. They have a bunch of predefined fractals already set up to explore but you can also apparently modify the formulas (in the Fragment tab). But given they are all written in GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language) I suspect it's not something easily accomplished.
Sorry about the image size, fractals compress badly (even with pngcrush on
brute).Fractal art is something I've been exploring for years, but since my switch to Linux, I've found it difficult to get a piece I find satisfying.
This one is close, hence the post.
The flam3 specification that most fractal exploration programs are based around, are insane. They expect you to fully understand the mathematics, and the flam3 program itself has a horrendous number of strange and mutually exclusive commandline flags.
So, most people use a program that does the heavy lifting for them.
On Windows, for a long time, Apophysis was king. A huge number of scripts were written for it, and a large number of hacks (dll injection and the like), as well. Which has resulted in some amazing artwork on DeviantArt and other places.
However, running Apophysis on Wine (because the Linux fork was abandoned a long time ago), sucks. Many of the hacks to improve the program (because it is nearly unmaintained), don't work as Wine doesn't have some of the strange backwards-compatibility binary hacks that Windows does.
I found Fractal Explorer to be awful, and GIMP's fractal explorer is incredibly basic, requiring huge amounts of scripting (Script-Fu) to bring up to a decent level.
However, I may have found something decent!
The linked image was generated using GIMP for some showy stuff, but mostly Mandelbulber2, which is multi-threaded, includes ray-tracing and proper 3D camera work, ambient occlusion, HDR and can connect to a render-farm to offload work.
Anybody got anything else they use?
I also used to use Apophysis (later the 7x variant) but ran into the same compatibility/linux issues you mentioned. I did some looking around and found JWildfire to be pretty nice (and much more portable), though I never spent as much time in it as I did Apophysis.
The only 3D work I ever did was all in Incendia, which was a great program but is Windows only and I've never tried to run it in Linux.
I was aware of Mandelbulber, but kind of bounced off the interface the first few times I tried it, nice to see that the project is still running!
I also still pop open xaos sometimes just for fun...
Mandelbulber and Mandelbulber2 are very different products, thankfully. (2 is a ground-up rewrite, focused on UI.)
The new UI is fairly intuitive, focused on controlling the camera in 3D space, and giving the user a preview of their work. So the expected workflow is kinda seed flame->adjust flame->move and focus camera on interesting area->render.
You can still reseed and run adjustments, but it's a smaller part of the UI, that's all.
Wine's AppHQ tells me the EX line of Incendia works brilliantly, and Wine supports multi-threading fairly well (well, multiple perfect test scores), so it may just work out-of-box.
I'm not so tempted when they're selling the mesh generators separately though.
I have only ever explored Fractals purely for fun, so your suggestions are probably way better than mine. However I have had fun in the past using Fractal Lab, which is a pretty neat browser-based generator/explorer. They have a bunch of predefined fractals already set up to explore but you can also apparently modify the formulas (in the Fragment tab). But given they are all written in GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language) I suspect it's not something easily accomplished.
It's pretty good, though not being able to render to a higher resolution than the screen is displaying is a bit of a bummer.