FractalGen

From TedTycoon.co.uk

FractalGen is an application that can create images of fractals in a mandelbrot set using a customisable range of colours and a customisable magnification. The program was made around Christmas 2010 in C#. The calculation of the fractals in a multi-threaded process. The user can change the number of iterations (colours), magnification, location and the colours that are used in the fractal image.

Creation

As creating high resolution images of fractals can take a very long time, the application is split into two parts. The first part of the application displays a low resolution preview of the fractal and allows you to zoom in and change the colours to your liking. When you are happy with your settings, you can then save a fractal configuration file which is then read by the second part of the application. The second part of the application is a console application which calculates a colour index for each pixel, this is multi-threaded and saved in seperate raw files. The same application is then used to load those raw files and produce a PNG image by applying a colour configuration onto the raw files loaded. This is normally a quick process. If you are not happy with the colour configuration, you can change them without having to re-compile the raw data files.

Produced images are normally created at a large size so that they can then be scaled down by a large factor. This increases the quality of the picture as it hides the individual (odd) pixels you get and applies a slight blur to whole picture.

A fractal image produced by FractalGen.