Drawing Flame Fractals

Question

I am looking for information on how to draw flame fractals from googling around I could not find much, either pages explain how to use third party tools or way too complicated for me to grasp. Anyone know how/why they work? or point me in the direction of not overly complicated implementations?

Answer 1

I think fractals would be too computationally expensive to do in real time.

If I Google "simulating fire in computer graphics" I get a number of interesting things that suggest that it's not a trivial problem (surprise). SIGGRAPH is a conference whose proceedings you'll want to check out. But be warned - this is very mathematically challenging.

Answer 2

Have a look at http://formulas.ultrafractal.com/

There you can download the "Completed Formula Pack"
The file enr.ucl file should contain the formula for the flame fractal.

For more info:
http://www.ultrafractal.com/kb/flamefractals.html

Answer 3

You could read the original paper by Scott Draves, which details precisely how and why they work, as well as a guide to an implementation in pseudocode.

As long as you have some basic knowledge of maths, it should be relatively straightforward to understand (though it is rather long!). To be honest, you can probably ignore much of it and just read about the code, since much of the text is background info.

Answer 4

Fractal flames are basically a variant of an iterated function system (IFS). You have a series of functions through which you pass a single point over and over again. Each function is a combination of an affine transformation and one or more variations.

Each iteration, only one function is chosen (at random), and the resulting point is accumulated into a buffer and used as the starting point of the next iteration.

The buffer is then saved as an image, after having been post-processed and filtered, as described in the flame paper.

The best reference is still the original implementation, flam3.

Answer 5

I have written a beamer presentation that covers the basics in flame fractals:

http://www2.math.su.se/~per/files.php?file=Fractals[2009]Beamer[Eng]-PAXINUM.pdf

All images are done from my java implementation of the flame algorithm.

My source code can be found here:

http://www2.math.su.se/~per/files.php?file=Paxiflame[2009]JavaSource[Eng]-PAXINUM.tar

I believe that the pdf http://flam3.com/flame_draves.pdf together with the implementation in java above should get you a long way.