Apophysis is an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

fractal flame editor and renderer for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

and

Macintosh Mac is a brand of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 1984. The name is short for Macintosh (its official name until 1999), a reference to the McIntosh (apple), McIntosh apple. The current product lineup inclu ...

. Apophysis has many features for creating and editing fractal flames, including an editor that allows one to directly edit the

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by manipulating triangles, a mutations window, which applies random edits to the triangles, an adjust window, which allows the adjustment of coloring and location of the image. It also provides a

scripting language In computing, a script is a relatively short and simple set of instructions that typically automation, automate an otherwise manual process. The act of writing a script is called scripting. A scripting language or script language is a programming ...

with direct access to most of the components of the fractal, which allows for effects such as the animations seen in

Electric Sheep Electric Sheep is a volunteer computing project for animating and evolving fractal flames, which are in turn distributed to the networked computers, which display them as a screensaver. Process The process is transparent to the casual user, ...

, which are also fractal flames. Users can export fractal flames to other fractal flame rendering programs, such as FLAM3. There is a separate version of Apophysis that supports 3D. There are numerous clones, ports, and forks of it.

History

Scott Draves Scott Draves is an American digital artist. He is the inventor of fractal flames and the leader of the distributed computing project Electric Sheep. He also invented patch-based texture synthesis and published the first implementation of this ...

invented Fractal Flames and published an

implementation written in C in the early 90s. In 2001, Ronald Hordijk translated his code into

Delphi Delphi (; ), in legend previously called Pytho (Πυθώ), was an ancient sacred precinct and the seat of Pythia, the major oracle who was consulted about important decisions throughout the ancient Classical antiquity, classical world. The A ...

and created a non-animated

screensaver A screensaver (or screen saver) is a computer program that blanks the display screen or fills it with moving images or patterns when the computer has been idle for a designated time. The original purpose of screensavers was to prevent phosphor s ...

. And in 2003 or 2004 Mark Townsend took Ronald's code and added a

graphical user interface A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows user (computing), users to human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through Graphics, graphical icon (computing), icons and visual indicators such ...

to create Apophysis. It has since been improved and updated by Peter Sdobnov, Piotr Borys, and Ronald Hordijk. Since 2009, there is a version of Apophysis called Apophysis 7X. Originally, it was targeting to provide support for modern Microsoft Windows operating systems like

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...

and 7. A strong feedback from the Apophysis users encouraged the developer Georg Kiehne to provide updates, which made 7X the most popular and advanced version of Apophysis so far.

Technical details

The user specifies a set of mathematical functions. Each function is a composition of an

affine map In Euclidean geometry, an affine transformation or affinity (from the Latin, '' affinis'', "connected with") is a geometric transformation that preserves lines and parallelism, but not necessarily Euclidean distances and angles. More generally ...

, and usually some non-linear map. This set of functions is called an iterated function system (IFS). Apophysis then generates the attractor of this set of functions, by means of

Monte Carlo simulation Monte Carlo methods, or Monte Carlo experiments, are a broad class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. The underlying concept is to use randomness to solve problems that might be det ...

. In fact, Apophysis generates a probability measure, which is then colored according to some rule.

Scripts

Apophysis uses the Scripter Studio scripting library to allow users to write scripts which run and either create a new flame, edit the existing flames, or do bigger tasks. One such instance is rendering an entire batch of fractals.

Plugins

Apophysis supports a plugin

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

so that new variations can be independently developed and distributed. There are numerous plugins available from the various user communities.

Sample images

Fireworks fractal flame.png Apophysis Example.png Fractal-Flux.png Apophysis 3D fractal ball.jpg Sealife001pp.png Fractal Flames Extra Hi-Resolution.png

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Apophysis (Software) Free graphics software Free software programmed in Delphi Windows-only free software Fractal software Pascal (programming language) software