fractals - transcendental experience

$[fractals]$

Chaos. The order coming from randomness. Simple mathmatical equations creating deeply complex and varied images when calculated and graphed with computers, these are fractals. Benoit Mandelbrot is credited with the term fractal and the discovery of the M-set, a plot of the Julia sets. This is my favorite set, the equation so incredibly basic and yet so enormously complex.

The program I have used most extensively and the one I feel is the best and most useful for creating wonderful colorful fantastic images with is FRACTINT. It is a DOS based program which runs quite well on Windows 95/98 and is available as freeware from the Stone Soup Group. I have also run it on Windows NT Workstation, though with a few problems. There are a number of other programs out there which run exclusively on Windows, but they do not have the functionality or the detail of FRACTINT. Your best bet for finding them is searching the internet for "fractals".

Recently, Fractint version 20 added the capability of rendering fractals in any size Disk Video mode you want to add. Disk Video modes in Fractint use either your extended memory or hard disk to write the image, instead of drawing it on the screen through the display adapter. Before the change in the program, the largest Disk Video mode I could render was only 2048x2048 pixels, forcing me to enlarge and stretch the fractal to fit the work, which degrades the quality of the printed fractal. By editing the fractint.cfg file, I was able to draw fractals which range in size from 7000x6000 up to 19000x12000 pixels for Creation and Destruction, enabling clear pixelation down to the hundreths of a centimetre. This adds a benefit to printing the work full size and not losing any detail, or in this case printing double-size!

The following are fractals generated with FRACTINT and edited using Adobe Photoshop.