distributed fractal rendering

[darxus]

I found a very beautiful abstract background that was exactly what I wanted. The description said it was made with Apophysis. That turned out to be a fractal flame generator. Fractals are good. Gimp can also render fractal flames. They are an extension of IFS fractals. This was apparently all started by Scott Draves in 1992. He created a free application to do distributed rendering of animations of these beautiful fractals, integrated into a screensaver which plays the animations back. Each animation segment is a part of a loop, with a beginning and ending corresponding to other segments, so they loop together smoothly.

This wonderfulness is called electric sheep. It is freely downloadable for Windows, MacOS, Linux, and BSD. The Debian package is electricsheep, and it is supported by xscreensaver.

I had heard of it before, but I guess nobody told me how cool it was in the right words.

The unfortunate part about it is that with current server load it's taking a couple hours to download the first few sheep to get the visuals going, but it is totally worthwhile. To see a few example segments go to electric sheep and click one of the "top sheep" on the left.

Comments

[superfinemind.livejournal.com]

Flarium's another neat fractal generator, though I've only used it for tinkering Mandelbrots.