How to program a fractal?

Question

I do not have any experience with programming fractals. Of course I've seen the famous Mandelbrot images and such.Can you provide me with simple algorithms for fractals? Programming language doesn't matter really, but I'm most familiar with actionscript, C#, Java.

Answer 1

There are actually two drawing approaches, but both are recursive.

Psuedo code goes something like this

DrawFractal ( GraphicsObjHandler, x, y, angle, depth)

if (depth==0)

then

EXITS the routine

else

changes the direction, size, or both;

Draws the image;

DrawFractal( graphicsObjHandler, x,y,angle, depth-1);

end if

end routine

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Here is some code found at RosettaCode dot org

import java.awt.Color;

import java.awt.Graphics;

import javax.swing.JFrame;

public class FractalTree extends JFrame {

public FractalTree() {

super("Fractal Tree");

setBounds(100, 100, 800, 600);

setResizable(false);

setDefaultCloseOperation(EXIT_ON_CLOSE);

}

private void drawTree(Graphics g, int x1, int y1, double angle, int depth) {

if (depth == 0) return;

int x2 = x1 + (int) (Math.cos(Math.toRadians(angle)) * depth * 10.0);

int y2 = y1 + (int) (Math.sin(Math.toRadians(angle)) * depth * 10.0);

g.drawLine(x1, y1, x2, y2);

drawTree(g, x2, y2, angle - 20, depth - 1);

drawTree(g, x2, y2, angle + 20, depth - 1);

}

@Override

public void paint(Graphics g) {

g.setColor(Color.BLACK);

drawTree(g, 400, 500, -90, 9);

}

public static void main(String[] args) {

new FractalTree().setVisible(true);

}

}