But in the world of digital art, fractals are truly unlike anything else.
The word "unique" is terribly overused and every artist wants to think that what they do is unique. It is this process that transforms an intriguing, but lifeless fractal shape into a finished work that reveals the artist's creative temperament. Rather, the artistic value of a work of fractal art is inextricably linked with the artist's creative process – the thoughtful selection and manipulation of coloring algorithms and gradients, which give shape, color, lighting and texture to the fractal structure compositional choices of zooming and cropping and the merging of several layers of fractal elements together. In his "Fractal Art Manifesto" Kerry Mitchell propounds that fractal art is not something that can be made by a computer alone, nor is it something that everyone with a computer can do well. A computer is required to perform, at the direction of the artist, the necessary calculations that transform the fractal from its native form – a mathematical formula – into shapes we can see but it has very little to do with aesthetics. įractals, like photographs, depict objective realities that already exist.
#Ultra fractal gnarl software#
Recently developed software such as Ultra Fractal and XenoDream now offer users many powerful and versatile features – the capability to layer and combine fractal elements together for example – that enable skilled artists to achieve striking artistic effects.
As more diverse calculation formulas and coloring algorithms were written, placing greater creative control in the hands of the fractal explorer, some enthusiasts began to view and classify these fractal images as art. They discovered shapes that were at times familiar yet almost other-worldly and generated thousands of visually interesting images. Using self-written programs or the popular freeware program, FractInt, early fractal explorers shared a fascination with the self-similarity and surprising complexity of the Mandelbrot and Julia sets. Fractals have the characteristic of infinitely repeating self-similarity that one sees in nature: in ferns, trees, mountains, and coastlines.įractals have been studied by mathematicians for the last hundred years, but it was Scientific American's 1985 article about Benoit Mandelbrot's discoveries that introduced the general public to fractal geometry. The fractal's shapes, colors, and textures are all controlled by these formulas, which are, in turn, controlled by the artist's manipulation of their parameters. Fractals are geometric representations of certain specialized mathematical formulas. Version 4 added support for animations and improved flame fractal rendering.įormulae from Fractint, an early and widely used piece of fractal-generating software, have been converted to an UltraFractal formula file.Under the relatively new umbrella of Digital Art – art made using a computer – there are several different genres and techniques, one of which is Fractal Art. Other features include fullscreen mode, color cycling, a render queue, distributed rendering calculations, and a detailed help file. The software calculates statistics about the fractal that is being previewed. The GUI is customizable with a dockable MDI. Ĭalculation using arbitrary precision arithmetic is supported, allowing users to zoom to a magnification of 10 4000. There is a busy mailing list on which many users post their parameter sets. Fractals may be copied from the interface and pasted as plain text into an email. Fractal formulas, coloring algorithms, and transformations may be written by users, and a large number of such formula files are available in a public formula database. The program works using a similar paradigm to Photoshop, allowing multiple layers to be combined using layer blending modes, transformations, and custom fractal formulas.
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