Par Fractal is a GPU-accelerated fractal renderer built with Rust and WebGPU. It provides an interactive environment for exploring both two-dimensional and three-dimensional fractals, with the rendering work handled by the GPU.
The application covers familiar escape-time sets such as Mandelbrot, Julia, Burning Ship and Tricorn alongside Buddhabrot visualisations, strange attractors and ray-marched 3D structures such as Mandelbulb, Mandelbox, Menger Sponge and Apollonian Gasket. Deep zooming uses perturbation techniques to avoid the precision collapse that normally appears at extreme magnification.
The same code base supports Linux through Vulkan and can also run in a compatible web browser using WebGPU. Rendering quality can be adjusted to balance visual fidelity and performance on different graphics hardware.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- GPU-accelerated rendering through WebGPU.
- Supports 2D escape-time fractals, density visualisations and strange attractors.
- Provides ray-marched 3D fractals including Mandelbulb, Mandelbox and Menger Sponge.
- Uses perturbation-based deep zooming for the Mandelbrot family.
- Offers adjustable powers for several escape-time formulas.
- Includes physically based shading, ambient occlusion, soft shadows, depth of field, fog and bloom.
- Provides real-time panning, zooming and 3D camera controls.
- Includes static and procedural colour palettes together with custom colour schemes.
- Offers presets, bookmarks, undo and redo.
- Provides a command palette for quickly accessing fractals, effects and settings.
- Can capture screenshots and record video on supported desktop builds.
- Supports custom output resolutions.
- Includes adaptive render scaling, level-of-detail controls and selectable quality profiles.
- Provides a built-in GPU frame profiler and GPU selection.
- Supports touch gestures on compatible devices.
- Can import and export configuration data.
Website: github.com/paulrobello/par-fractal
Support:
Developer: Paul Robello
License: MIT License
Par Fractal is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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