IFS

IFS stands for Iterated Function Systems, a method of drawing a fractal. These aren’t your usual Julia or Mandelbrot fractals. They’re also known by the name “fractal flame”, and are used as the sole method of image creation in the Electric Sheep screensaver.

I’m experimenting with my own implementation, using Perl as a wrapper building a C program and passing it to gcc to render each frame. I’ve been slowly adding more and more features to the program as well as using various other Perl scripts to distribute the rendering over dozens of Unix/Linux machines scattered around the world.

Media

Stills

Click the stills to enlarge them.

Videos

Quicktime

These videos are playable with Quicktime or any standards-compliant player, such as VLC or MPlayer. These videos may also tax your machine more, so if you have trouble there are still lower quality YouTube videos below.

YouTube

Unfortunately, youtube totally screwed the quality up, but you get the idea. It’s much more impressive when it isn’t blocky.

License

All images, videos, and source code here are Copyrighted 2007 Chris Kastorff.

All images and videos on this page are released under the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license. The source code for the IFS implementation will be released under a BSD-like license. Any original content that users create using that source are in the copyright of their creator.