nbetts / fractals

An interactive tool to visualise and manipulate fractals in 3D.

Fractals

The aim of this program is to illustrate different types of fractals and allow you to customise various parameters to better understand how they work. They are all based on procedural modelling.

For a list of planned features, see todo.md

Existing Fractals

For a list of planned fractals, see fractals.md

• Diamond-square algorithm:

Input Controls

Move the mouse to turn the camera and zoom with the mouse scroll.

Key	Action
ESC	exit the program
1	reinitialise profile
SPACE	regenerate fractal
W	move camera forward
S	move camera backward
A	move camera left
D	move camera right
U	move light forward
J	move light backward
I	move light up
K	move light down
O	move light left
L	move light right
F	toggle vertex facets
N	toggle vertex normals
X	toggle fractal wireframe
Z	invert fractal shine

Profile Settings

These following settings allow you to adjust various parameters before running the simulation and can be found in profile.txt.

Name	Value Range	Description
System properties
isFullScreenEnabled	0,1	Initial toggle of fullscreen window
Environment properties
isPointLightingEnabled	0,1	initial toggle of point/direction lighting
lightPositionX	-∞-∞	x position of light source
lightPositionY	-∞-∞	y position of light source
lightPositionZ	-∞-∞	z position of light source
backgroundColourRed	0.0-1.0	Brightness of sky red colour
backgroundColourGreen	0.0-1.0	Brightness of sky green colour
backgroundColourBlue	0.0-1.0	Brightness of sky blue colour
Fractal properties
areFacesEnabled	0,1	Initial toggle of fractal facets
isWireframeEnabled	0,1	Initial toggle of fractal wireframe
areNormalsEnabled	0,1	Initial toggle of vertex normals
isCullingEnabled	0,1	Initial toggle of vertex culling
fractalDepth	1-∞	Iterations in the fractal generation
fractalYRange	0.0-∞	Initial Y range of the fractal
fractalYDeviance	0.0-∞	Initial Y deviance of the fractal
fractalColourRed	0.0-1.0	Brightness of fractal red colour
fractalColourGreen	0.0-1.0	Brightness of fractal green colour
fractalColourBlue	0.0-1.0	Brightness of fractal blue colour
normalLength	-∞-∞	Length of the visualised normal lines
wireframeColourRed	0.0-1.0	Brightness of wireframce red colour
wireframeColourGreen	0.0-1.0	Brightness of wireframce green colour
wireframeColourBlue	0.0-1.0	Brightness of wireframce blue colour
wireframeColourAlpha	0.0-1.0	Alpha value of wireframce colour
isSmoothingPositionsEnabled	0,1	Initial toggle of vertex position smoothing
isSmoothingNormalsEnabled	0,1	Initial toggle of vertex normal smoothing
isSmoothingColoursEnabled	0,1	Initial toggle of vertex colour smoothing
isColourNoiseEnabled	0,1	Initial toggle of vertex colour noise
smoothPositionsKernelSize	1-∞	Size of position smoothing kernel
smoothPositionsSigmaValue	0.0-∞	Sigma value of position smoothing kernel
smoothNormalsKernelSize	1-∞	Size of normal smoothing kernel
smoothColoursKernelSize	1-∞	Size of colour smoothing kernel
smoothColoursSigmaValue	0.0-∞	Sigma value of colour smoothing kernel
colourNoiseLevel	0.0-1.0	Noise level of colour noise
Camera properties
cameraMovementSpeed	0.0-∞	Movement speed of free mode camera
cameraTurnSensitivity	0.0-∞	Mouse movement/scroll sensitivity
cameraFov	1.0-180.0	Field of view (in degress)

Requirements

• GLFW 3.0
• GLEW 2.0.0 - The OpenGL Extension Wrangler Library
• OpenGL Mathematics (GLM)

If you have Homebrew, you can install these using brew install glfw3 glew glm.

Compiling/Running

The current implementation can be found in the new directory, then:

• ./build.sh to compile
• ./build.sh -r to compile and immediately run
• ./build.sh -x or ./main to run

You can specify one optional argument as an existing file to use as an alternative to the default profile, e.g. ./build.sh -x profile2.txt