Fractals

[TweaK]

I've seen some good fractals lying around deviantart... I want to get into them, but I don't know where to start. Two common-name programs I've seen are Apophysis, and Ultra-Fractal, but I have no idea how to use them. Help?

 

[MacMan]

Oh come on, they're easy as pi
Just start off with them the same way you would start off with any other new graphics program.

 

[TweaK]

*starts filter raping*

 

[CelestialBadger]

Okay, well apophysis is...well, you can press random keys and it will still look good. Ultra Fractal comes with tutorials that will teach you pretty much everything about the program.

EDIT: And if you don't already have it, download gimp.

 

[DigitalElite]

excuse me for the newb question, but what is a fractal?

 

[MacMan]

A fractal is just a graph of a complex function that looks pretty. A guy named Mandelbrot figured out the first computer fractal, "z = z^2 + c," and it looked pretty cool, but fractals have been around way before him. Clouds, trees, any self repeating image is a fractal (Julia sets are the only true computer fractals). If you've ever seen Sierpinski's triangle (a triangle divided into four smaller triangles, which are divided again, and again...) then you've seen a fractal. Computer fractals work much the same way, but with real and imaginary axes, that's how they're able to get results with such "complex" (ha ha, a pun, heh... heheh... heh... woooo...) formulas. Coloring is just based on how "quickly" values of the input progress to infinities.