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. Limit an effect to a movable, rotatable and scalable rectangle or ellipse with a soft edge. New layers appear above the selection, including inside a group. Groups using effects or a 3D tilt are still flattened within page bounds; a dotted outline makes that boundary visible.

Combine 70 generators with 35 effects: Mandelbrot, Julia, Feather, SFX and Kali sit alongside Hénon, Duffing, Ikeda and Chirikov maps drawn over their own parameters. The collection also covers Lyapunov, six raymarched 3D fractals, space-filling curves in a plane or cube, particle attractors, plants, L-systems, domain warping, plasma, marble, shapes, gradients, text, ASCII art and imported pictures or clips. Find fractals under escape-time, chaotic maps, curves/constructions and 3D; effects are grouped into colour/tone, blur/light, distortion and halftone/retro. The shelf layout does not alter saved projects.

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.

Export MP4 with H.264/AAC or WebM with VP9/Opus where the browser supports encoding that format. Use lossless APNG when the animation needs transparency. Music and video-layer sound follow the same timing as the images. Sample frames provide an estimate of export duration, and the file streams to disk as it is produced.

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.