Around eleven years ago, when Home Computers were in their relative infancy, I was involved in designing loading screens and backgrounds for Computer Games, and producing promotional graphics for the Amstrad range of Home Computers. I started with Screen Designer on the Amstrad CPC 464, drawing pixel by pixel with only four colours available on screen at a time. Things improved with later models and more advanced drawing programs, and then along came scanners and such, and in a very short time my services were no longer required! I've written a more detailed curriculum vitae, which includes lots of animated GIFs (my latest hobby). Its not for the faint hearted or those with less than a P60 Pentium processor.
These days it is a great pleasure to feed in a few parameters to fractint and to sit back and watch my computer do all the work - and with what fascinating results. This exceptional program produced by, and available free from The Stone Soup Group, has all the charm and excitement of the kaleidoscope I had as a child. I don't pretend to understand all the mathematics involved. The pleasure I get from the end product appeals to the artist in me, and often I want to cry 'Come and look at this one'.
There are many beautiful examples of Fractals on the Net - a very comprehensive list of sites can be found if you visit the Spanky Fractal Database - but the majority will not load back into fractint, even when they were originally produced with that program, because the file format has been changed. Except when people have included parameter files, there is often no way of discovering where they originated. In an attempt to 'do something different', on my pages I am not including any huge files that will take up valuable net time to redraw on screen. Instead, I have reduced my fractals, which were all drawn at 800 x 600, to 80 x 60 thumbnails, within fractint. The theory is that you can load them back in, increase the resolution to 800 x 600, and you will get the original fractal. In most cases this will happen quite quickly, although one or two may take a while to redraw. Be patient! This works with Fractint for Windows (Winfract) 18.21, and I believe that it will work with other versions of Fractint. Feedback will be much appreciated.
In making my selection from the vast number of Fractals I have generated in the past two years I have mainly tried to avoid the usual 'coils', 'dragons' and 'elephants', and to include some of the more unusual results I have discovered. I hope you will find them useful and enjoyable.
My thanks to Noel Giffin for his wealth of information on Fractals, available at the Spanky Fractal Database, and for his collection of Colormaps, and also to Jack Orman for his Colormaps, and his nice little mapmaker utility, which I used to design many of the early Colormaps for my Fractal collection. Thanks also to Ron Barnett for makemap which I use now and find absolutely invaluable.
People keep asking in my guestbook for the location of FRACTINT and WINFRACT. So here are the links directly to the Spanky Fractal Database directory where the application programs are located.
At simtelnet
Via your favourite FTP program, login to spanky.triumf.ca as ANONYMOUS, and change directories to [pub.fractals.programs.ibmpc], then download frainXXX.zip. (The directory syntax is in VAX format.)