Fractal Designer features in detail

Combine any number of generators and effects through eleven blend modes. Groups carry their own effect chain and shared transform, while masks can use chroma keying, distance from a gradient or the luminance of another layer.

The library contains 61 generators and 35 effects: escape-time fractals, six raymarched 3D fractals, particle attractors, plants and L-systems, organic patterns, shapes, gradients, text, ASCII art, plus imported images and video.

Every layer runs in a WebGPU shader and is cached under a content hash of its parameters. Editing one layer or changing stack order therefore leaves all unchanged layers ready for reuse instead of rendering them again.

A dedicated Mandelbrot layer applies perturbation theory: the CPU supplies a double-precision reference orbit and the GPU calculates smaller deltas. Useful magnification continues far beyond the point where a conventional shader becomes blocky.

Pages begin transparent and the complete compositor uses premultiplied alpha. Soft edges stay clean, invisible pixels cannot tint later layers, and a checkerboard makes every transparent region obvious while editing.

A keyframe records the entire scene, so successive points may contain different layer stacks and still cross-fade. Van Wijk and Nuij camera interpolation couples zoom and pan to keep a subject moving at a steady apparent speed.

A track is analysed up front into curves for level, bass, mid, treble, onset and brightness. Formulas can bind any numeric parameter to those deterministic signals; waveform and beat grid appear on the timeline, and the audio travels inside the project.

The browser is probed before offering MP4 with H.264/AAC, WebM with VP9/Opus or transparent lossless APNG. Music and video-layer audio use the same time mapping as the frames; measured test frames estimate duration, and output streams directly to disk.

Physical page formats are rendered at 300 dpi. Overlapping tiles include enough apron for the document’s effects, keeping memory close to one tile while producing even an A1 poster without seams.

Alpha-aware colour stops interpolate in perceptually uniform Oklab and can be saved in a browser-local library. Editing a gradient already shared by another object automatically forks it, preventing accidental colour changes elsewhere.

Imported photos and clips receive the same 2D/3D transforms, blending and masks as procedural layers. Video can be trimmed, reversed and given an end behaviour; frame and sound share one time function, and media is embedded with the project.

The picture becomes a height field whose slope supplies a surface normal for diffuse light and highlights. Unlike a grey emboss overlay, the shading multiplies the original colour, preserving the artwork’s hues.

Load an image into the gradient editor and it becomes a 2D colour source. Existing one-dimensional consumers quietly read its middle row, while escape-time fractals can map smooth iteration across one axis and escape angle across the other.

Presentation mode plays the finished work across the full display while hiding tools, layers, inspector, timeline, page outline and transform handles. Escape returns to the editor exactly where it was, without changing the project.