Fractal Movies in Lisp
Sunday, July 24, 2005
As you can tell by looking at my desktop, I like Fractal images. I
posted a while back about creating
Mandelbrot Set ASCII art and I'm always on the lookout for neat
fractal-generating code that is written in Lisp.
Yannick Gingras created some nice fractals using Lisp (and even
sells some of the images on T-shirts and other stuff). His
fract package is available but I could never get all the pre-reqs to build on my
Mac.
Well, now David Steuber has created his own CL code for generating
Mandelbrot set images and it consists of just a single
Lisp
program. When you run the program, it creates a series of frames in
.tga format. He has imported these frames into QuickTime to create a couple of movies that zoom in/out on
different fractals. The
first movie was pretty neat, but his
latest one is really cool. The perfect thing to watch after you've
finished a hacking session and have settled down with a brew (or
alternative) ;-). David also has a
page where he talks about how he created the images and
another interesting page on Mandelbrot Set Attractors.
Here
is a snapshot of my desktop with one of the
Movie 1 images as well as
Movie 2 playing in QuickTime:
David has recently submitted answers to
the
ITA Software programming puzzles. It also looks like he's going to
be submitting an entry in the
Apress Fractal Contest. Best wishes to David in both of these!
