Make Fractal Art
Flam3 is a fractal art generator written by Scott Draves. It's also the heart of a collaborative screen saver called Electric Sheep (named after the Philip K. Dick novel). While a beautiful fractal animation plays on the user's screen, their computer is simultaneously rendering a few new frames for a future animation. Each computer uploads its new frames to a server, and in return downloads new animations that were created by the distributed network. These "electric sheep" are the "dreams" of the sleeping machines. A program called Oxidizer (Mac) lets you edit those animations and create your own - or render single frames as high-resolution artwork. (You could also use Apophysis for Windows, or Qosmic for Linux). To get started, browse the current flock of sheep. Click on one you like, download its "genome", load it up in Oxidizer and start playing around with its genes (here's a nice tutorial). You can even cross-breed multiple sheep to create a hybrid. When you come up with something you like, you can render it as an animation or still frame. There are infinite variations to be made, so have at it! Oh, and did I mention that all of this software is free? Update: Scott Draves just pointed me to a preview of the next version of Electric Sheep, featuring even higher quality animations. Thanks, Spot!
