Project: Visualizing Julia and Mandelbrot Sets

Feb 25

Click to see gallery of full-sized images…

Introduction

With my introduction to fractals from my fractal geometry and L-Systems projects, it was only natural that the next fractal I would implement would be the Mandelbrot Set. Producing static images representing the Mandelbrot and its Julia Sets was simple enough, but I wanted to do more than z→z^2 + c… and none of the complex number libraries I found for C# (my main language at the time) had all of the functions I wanted to use. As such, I developed my own (unoptimized) Complex class that can perform all of the evaluable functions that my PlotEquation plugin can do, but now with complex values. I spent much of my free time exploring new fractals upon its completion (especially after converting the project to OpenGL), many of which are shown in this post’s gallery. In addition, a more expansive gallery showing my fractal animations can be found here. I’ve since added the ability to project fractals onto the Riemann Sphere, which can be further explored here.