Apophysis (software)

Apophysis is an open source fractal flame editor and renderer for Microsoft Windows and Macintosh.

Apophysis has many features for creating and editing fractal flames, including an editor that allows one to directly edit the transforms by manipulating triangles, a mutations window, which applies random edits to the triangles, an adjust window, which allows the adjustment of coloring and location of the image. It also provides a scripting language with direct access to most of the components of the fractal, which allows for effects such as the animations seen in Electric Sheep, which are also fractal flames. Users can export fractal flames to other fractal flame rendering programs, such as FLAM3.

There is a separate version of Apophysis that supports 3D. There are numerous clones, ports, and forks of it.

History

Scott Draves invented Fractal Flames and published an open source implementation written in C in the early 90s. In 2001, Ronald Hordijk translated his code into the Delphi programming language (Delphi 6) and created a non-animated screensaver. And in 2003 or 2004 Mark Townsend took Ronald's code and added a graphical user interface to create Apophysis. It has since been improved and updated by Peter Sdobnov, Piotr Borys, and Ronald Hordijk.

Since 2009, there is a version of Apophysis called Apophysis 7X. Originally, it was targeting to provide support for modern Microsoft Windows operating systems like Windows Vista and 7.