Fractron 9000 a fantastic fractal renderer and editor - freeware.

Hi,

I would like to point out a fantastic CUDA accelerated app called Fractron 9000. Google for it. It’s freeware, but not open source - and it’s Windows only (based on .NET Framework I believe). The author doesn’t seem to advertise this program anywhere - so I’ll jump in and do it ;)

This tool renders so called fractal flames which are based on iterated function systems (IFS). It renders these fractals by means of playing the chaos game. I.e. it iterates starting with randomly chosen points and counts how often each screen pixel was visited. Then it converts the result into an image using a tone mapping algorithm. The longer you render, the less noisy the factal will become - but you can follow the rendering process in real time which distinguishes this software from many others I’ve seen

This software “only” offers 5 variations of linear and non-linear transformations that can be arbitrarily combined (other tools like Apophysis offer way more, but then they aren’t nearly as fast). This is the fastest flame renderer I’ve seen, hands down.

One particularly nice feature of this program is the editor which allows you to edit the linear transformation that is applied to each branch of the fractal with immediate visual feedback. The default view consists of three strictly linear branches, arranged to form the famous Sirpinski Triangle. To get started, drag around the transformations (indicated by circles with handles that you can click your mouse on) and inspect the visual effect. Also try rotating these for best effect. Then proceed to load some of the sample fractals that ship with the program.

Coolest use of CUDA I’ve seen so far. I could play with this for hours.

Christian

That is cool, I like the interactive editing. I did a GPU flame renderer like this at Siggraph 05, but it used OpenGL and wasn’t anywhere near this fast!
[url=“http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1187128”]http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1187128[/url]

Argh, your paper is behind a paywall. Are you hosting this anywhere else, by any chance?

UPDATE: found it. http://download.nvidia.com/developer/prese…_ifs_sketch.pdf

By the way is the related source code available from somewhere? Your original home page “simesgreen” on geocities.com went the way of the dodo, and the wayback machine didn’t archive anything gpuflame related.

More IFS fractals rendered in CUDA here

[url=“GPGPU”]http://ca.olin.edu/2008/gpgpu/index.htm[/url]

This looks like a project made to learn CUDA, and comes with source code.

UPDATE:

[url=“GPU Flame Fractal”]http://christopheremoore.net/gpu-flame-fractal/[/url]

And this is a realtime-animated Fractal Flame written in the Lua scripting language using an OpenGL wrapper. Comes with source. Uses shaders instead of CUDA. Binaries for the OpenGl wrapper on Mac and Windows are provided as well, the Lua fractal flame script then runs on both platforms.

Christian

Yeah, geocities died and I haven’t found any new web space yet. I never released the source code, but here’s the slides and an exe for posterity.

The UI is terrible, but the patterns still look pretty good - press ‘h’, ‘o’, ‘s’ and then keep hitting ‘z’!
gpuflame.zip (920 KB)
GPU_ifs_sketch.pdf (5.43 MB)

I believe the source is listed on the sourceforge page, if you click on “Files”.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/fractron9000/files/

The author has just released it under the terms of the GPL. That is mouthwateringly wonderful. With this software I just created an image that looks surprisingly like the famous “Pillars of Creation” image - and I did not even need a multi billion space telescope to do that. A few billion pixels were sufficient

This doesn’t stop me from trying to implement my own flame roaster in CUDA though ;-)

Christian