Fractal Designer

Procedural documents, not fixed pixels

Fractal Designer stores a scene as layers and parameters rather than a bitmap. A Mandelbrot set, Voronoi pattern, text object or drop shadow is rendered again whenever its description changes. Projects remain compact, edits stay lossless and the same composition can be produced at very different resolutions.

The editor combines 70 generators and 35 effects into 105 layer types in a familiar layer stack. Your own images and video clips behave like ordinary layers: transform, blend, mask or trim them, then keep the source media inside the project. Eleven blend modes, groups with their own effect chains and masks driven by colour, gradient proximity or another layer's luminance complete the compositing system. WebGPU performs the work on the local GPU, while content-based caching avoids rendering unaffected layers again.

Find new territory without hunting through tools

Feather and SFX add new fractal structures, while Hénon, Duffing, Ikeda and Chirikov turn parameter choices into zoomable landscapes. Separate shelves for fractal families and effect tasks make the larger collection easier to browse; existing projects need no changes.

Start quickly, adjust with confidence

Sixteen templates offer finished scenes to explore. Give the document a name that also carries into saved and exported filenames. Reset one transform or all of them together, with a single undo step. Switching templates or opening another file asks before replacing unsaved work; a full local store prompts a manual save.

From deep zoom to large-format output

• The ordinary Mandelbrot, Julia, Burning Ship, Tricorn, Celtic, Spider and Phoenix layers raise arithmetic precision automatically before block artefacts appear; dedicated deep-zoom layers carry the journey farther.
• Load music, bind numeric parameters to level, bass, mids, treble, beats or brightness, then export MP4 or WebM with synchronized sound—or a transparent APNG.
• Explore Mandelbrot regions with perturbation theory beyond the practical precision of a basic shader.
• Mix escape-time fractals, six raymarched 3D fractals, plants, organic patterns, shapes, text and ASCII art.
• Animate complete scene states with keyframes, cinematic camera interpolation, onion skinning and ping-pong playback.
• Turn an image into a two-dimensional gradient, or relight a result from its colour or alpha slope for a rounded, dimensional surface.
• Present a finished animated composition full-screen without editing controls.
• Maintain real transparency throughout the layer pipeline.
• Export PNG, animated PNG, separately offered MP4 or WebM video, or a seamlessly tiled 300 dpi PDF at a physical page size.
• Create alpha-aware Oklab gradients and keep them in a reusable browser-local library.

A practical workflow

1. Open one of 16 starter templates or create a blank transparent page.
2. Add generators, effects, images or video clips, then reorder, group or mask the layers.
3. Tune parameters, gradients, transforms and masks in the inspector while panning and zooming on the canvas.
4. Capture keyframes on the timeline when the scene should move.
5. Choose the page format and export an image, animation, video or PDF—or save the editable project as JSON.

For designers, generative artists and developers

Fractal Designer is aimed at people who want procedural artwork without installing software or writing shaders, and who need a usable final asset rather than only an on-screen experiment. Fractal mathematics is optional: the templates start with completed compositions that can be taken apart one parameter at a time. Familiarity with layers, blend modes and masks helps.

Local processing with desktop requirements

Documents, exports and preferences remain inside the browser. Imported audio, images and video are kept in browser storage for the session and embedded in the JSON project file, so a saved project can move intact to another computer. Private browsing, cleared site data or a full disk can remove the browser copy; the exported project remains the portable source.

WebGPU and roughly 1000 pixels of desktop width are required, while video export also depends on WebCodecs. There is no offline or mobile layout. Video formats have no alpha channel and fill transparent areas with the selected page background; PDF intentionally flattens them onto white for print. The interface is available in German and English. Many editor actions have keyboard alternatives, but the rendered artwork itself is not exposed to screen readers.