Create your own stunning fractal formations

Fractals are basically mathematical calculations which give birth to some stunning random images and formations. Fractal Domains (formerly known as FracPPC) is a program that generates color fractal images which allows you to explore and create an unlimited variety of images.

With Fractal Domains you can generate color images of the most popular fractal, (known as the Mandelbrot set) and also generate images of what are known as associated Julia sets. You can also generate an unlimited variety of fractal types based on rational functions, including fractals based on Newton’s method and Halley’s method.

Although Fractal Domains isn’t exactly straightforwards, it isn’t too hard to get to grips with. It’s essential though to read the developer tutorial before starting out. However, the tutorial is quite long and you’ll need to set aside a few hours to really get the best from it. You should take a good look at the developer site in general which has a gallery of images created in Fractal Domains and also a handy list of FAQs.

Fractal Domains is a powerful fractal generating program if you’re willing to invest time in learning how it works.

A build error in 2.0.10 resulted in an application that would only run under OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). This build error has been corrected, and 2.0.11 should run correctly on all versions of OS X from 10.4 onwards.The corrections to allow better performance of the GUI while rendering in the background caused a degradation of the performance of rendering.Changes have been made to partially correct this. The edit window fractal generation should be very fast now. The background rendering is now probably at par with its previous performance, but greater speed with multiple cores is still possible for anti-aliased images. Further speed increases will probably be made available in the next version.

Changes

• A build error in 2.0.10 resulted in an application that would only run under OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). This build error has been corrected, and 2.0.11 should run correctly on all versions of OS X from 10.4 onwards.The corrections to allow better performance of the GUI while rendering in the background caused a degradation of the performance of rendering.Changes have been made to partially correct this. The edit window fractal generation should be very fast now. The background rendering is now probably at par with its previous performance, but greater speed with multiple cores is still possible for anti-aliased images. Further speed increases will probably be made available in the next version.