Show HN: Fractal.parts – View and design fractals

Show HN: Fractal.parts – View and design fractals(fractal.parts)

58 points by epenson 6 years ago | 17 comments

EventH- 6 years ago |

It would be really nice if the tutorial walked you through creating a sample simple fractal, like the Sierpinski triangle or Koch snowflake.

suyash 6 years ago | |

Yes, tried to create but due to lack of instructions and poor UX abandoned the site quickly.

dmje 6 years ago | | |

Agree. It'd be good to be able to unpick the really good ones on there and understand how they were created. I just made nasty looking splodges and then gave up :-/

yboris 6 years ago |

Related -- a tool for creating fractals:

Context Free Art - https://www.contextfreeart.org/

pickdenis 6 years ago |

It would be cool if the preview was shown and auto-updated every time a change is made.

HelloNurse 6 years ago | |

JWildfire, a Java desktop application to author "flame" fractals (a slight generalization of these IFS constructions) has a nice realtime preview and a subtly less maddening user experience.

epenson 6 years ago |

Author here. Happy to answer any questions.

vosper 6 years ago | |

Firstly, I think this is a cool idea. Fractals are fun to look at and play with. Please take this feedback as being positively-intentioned :)

During the tutorial I clicked Add and some boxes were created. I dragged them around on the canvas. I have no concept of how the resulting image [0] relates to what I created. It doesn't look like the kind of fractals (Mandelbrot etc) that I'm familiar with.

I also didn't figure out how to do anything other than move some boxes around. Probably I just missed something.

[0] https://fractal.parts/i-dont-get-it <-- if you click the "Attractor" (what does that mean?) toggle in the top right you can see the "Template" I created in the editor.

ssalka 6 years ago | | |

The fractals on this site are not "escape-time fractals" like the Mandelbrot set, but iterated function systems[1], a more discrete fractal variant that starts with an initial generating set and then replaces each element with a smaller copy of the whole set (a good example would be ferns).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterated_function_system

sjf 6 years ago | | |

Agreed, I can't see how the output is produced from the input, e.g https://fractal.parts/dfdfdfdfd it took several tries to even produce anything other a totally blank output.

TimTheTinker 6 years ago | |

Here's my try. Any idea why it didn’t result in the Sierpinsky triangle?

https://fractal.parts/test-a1d7

I can't seem to create more than 1 box of the same color.

epenson 6 years ago | | |

Thanks for giving the site a try! Simple answer: the shapes in your template are too small. Try scaling the squares to 1/2 the size of that larger, white square in the center. This can be seen in the template for https://fractal.parts/sierpinski.

Each shape that you add is a transformation from the base shape. The base shape is that large, white square that appears when you first head to fractal.parts/create. The transformations in your template are around 1/4 the size of the base shape. Your template also has a fair bit of whitespace. Together this produces a fractal that progressively disappears.

jrk 6 years ago |

Nice work! @epenson: unfortunately, it only took a few hours for someone to create https://fractal.parts/swastika and get it on the gallery :(

fractallyte 6 years ago | |

It's an ancient symbol. Let's just enjoy the fractal-ness of this entry in the gallery, and not allow the idea to be misappropriated.

nneonneo 6 years ago |

Tried to publish with Firefox, got the following error (in console):

TypeError: t.t0.response is undefined Create.js:139:16

Please fix your site for Firefox; it's sad when people only test with Chrome :(

epenson 6 years ago | |

Sorry about the trouble. Should be fixed now (https://github.com/ElliotPenson/fractal.parts/issues/51)