About JWildfire

JWildfire Fractal generator software

Introduction by Michael Bourne

You wouldn’t be here unless you loved fractals right? You love to create them but what is the best fractal software you can use? Well, of course that largely depends on the kind of image you’re after. JWildfire creates fractal flames, which are a type that goes beyond the usual boring mandelbrot images you see all over the web. Rendering fractal flames is so easy with JWildfire, but the possibilities are absolutely endless.

The fractal imagery created in JWildfire is generated with “variations” and there’s several hundred types of variation you can add and combine. That’s not to say you can’t adjust parameters, each variation has a series of values, some have a couple, others have them in dozens. Animations are also possible with JWildfire, create a series of fractal shapes that change over time, and feed them into a video editor for amazing results.

Fractal generating software has been around a long time, and there are thousands of examples of great fractal art to be found around the web. You can see examples of some great art at the JWildfire Sanctuary art site. They range from fractal landscapes to subtle twists on shape and geometry.

Your computer doesn’t have to be state of the art to render these fractal images either, it does help of course when you want to render fractal flames, but you can easily play and create great results with only a basic setup.

So to create great fractal imagery, you still have many options, “fractal explorer”, “ultra fractal” and many other fractal generators, but if you want a package that you’ll become addicted to, and is free ! Then you should really check out JWildfire, there is a version that runs on the Steam platform, which has a tiny price tag, but offers easier set up and is self contained. The free version requires you have Java set up.

Computer graphics have come a long way since the early days, and so have the packages that are used. Using JWildfire is easy, and immensely satisfying. You owe it to yourself to give it a go to make your own fractals to share. Talking of which it has a great community and a whole heap of resources available, all for free to help you take your art to the next level.

About JWildfire – Andreas Maschke

JWildfire is the spiritual successor of the award winning image-processing software Wildfire7PPC for the Amiga in the old days. But, this time implemented using a high-level language (Java), with a more sophisticated user interface, and many more cool effects, modules and features such as flame-fractals. Hopefully, becoming the product which was initially in mind (Unfortunately, in the old days the computers were not as powerful and some of the concepts of the original software did not work. They were too slow, not stable or both)

What does this mean? In short, the primary goal of the software is to be just fun to the user, by providing nearly endless possibilities to “mess around” to create computer-generated images in a playful way. You may also think of it as a creative computer game with a massive “open-world”.

JWildfire online

Open source

Even if the code is far from perfection, the software is not only free, it is also open source. So everybody is invited to join in order to improve the product. You can join/visit the project at GitHub

Flame fractal editor

Currently the most complete feature is the Flame fractal module called TINA.

(“TINA” is a recursive acronym and actually means “TINA is not Apophysis”).

Backed up by JWildfire’s image-processing-capability, TINA is a really powerful and versatile flame fractal software, and additionally… it runs on nearly any platform.

TINA features a powerful and intuitive editor, a simple-to-use morphing-based animation-editor, motion-blur, freely editable motion-curves for almost any property, a gradient-editor, a module were you can create sound-synchronized Flame fractal movies, and much much more.

Key Features of JWildfire

  • Contains the most complete and versatile Flame fractal editor available
  • Has not one but TWO advanced Flame animation modules, one of which allows for sound syncing of any parameters to imported MP3 files
  • Almost every parameter in the fractal editor can be keyframed using various interpolation types
  • Has many additional ground breaking features and modules such as Bokeh, MutaGen and iFlames
  • Comes with various Render Options such as the Interactive (Infinite) Renderer which can also be used for generating random Flames “on-the-fly” and an Intelligent Batch Renderer Engine
  • Stunning 3D effects (such as wave3D, water, twirl3d, …)
  • 3D effect superimposition (e. g. wave3D interference)
  • Image compositing (layers, even for HDR images)
  • Image generators (perlin noise, cloud generator, plasma, …)
  • Many “common” image processing effects in 2D (such as twirl, erode, convolve, …)
  • Simple, powerful and visually appealing graphical user interface
  • Sunflow renderer integration for high quality rendering (experimental)
  • Robust and object-oriented software-design, easy to extend
  • Runs on any major platform which features a Java runtime (does not mean that you need a Java plugin for your Web browser)

JWildfire history

The first prototype

JWildfire is the spiritual successor of the award winning image-processing software Wildfire7PPC for the Amiga back in the ’90s.

In 2000 Andreas Maschke created a prototype, initially for a new Wildfire-application in C++, but was not satisfied with it.

Additionally, the development-environment and his computer, were so slow that it seemed too much work to succeed with it as a project… Particularly when having just a little spare time available for the project.

Ten years later Andreas started a new prototype again, but this time coded in Java and with a new computer.

He was immediately hooked!

What a big difference in development-speed, it was pure fun and he used the project primarily to relax.

He ported portions of the old code from the Amiga to Java, this was not his best decision because this code was really poor, according to Andreas… But it was an easy way to start.

reproduced with permission from JWildfire Wiki

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