Rendering flame fractals with a compute shader (2023)
7 comments
·September 8, 2025Ono-Sendai
pixelpoet
Oh hey Nick, fancy seeing you here :)
Scene_Cast2
I love the look of flame fractals, but I never figured out how to tweak things to get them to look more like how I want. I could never predict what a particular change would do to the look, or which change is needed to get a particular look.
I tried Apophysis (or one of the many spinoffs), but it never quite clicked.
greatepee
Here's a web editor that has a fairly simple interface: https://fractalar-app.web.app
It might not run very well depending on your hardware, though.
schindlabua
Fractal flames is such a cool algorithm. They're what got me into programming many moons ago :)
pixelpoet
Oh wow, it really has been many moons! You might recall a guy called lycium/lyc from those days :D
We're lurking on Discord these days, there are some new people from Austria sometimes joining our meetups, you should come along :)
reactordev
This bring back memories of Apophysis
Cool. If you want to try rendering some flame fractals, you can try our Fractal software Chaotica (https://www.chaoticafractals.com/) which was used to make the first image in the linked post (Vorpol Dawn By technochroma).
We didn't exactly use compute shaders for Chaotica, we used OpenCL instead, which is a more general GPGPU framework like CUDA.