I have done some scrounging and am building the capacity for orbit traps into Genetic Image. Orbit traps are one of the more interesting ways to represent classic complex function fractal imagery. For those of you who see a lot of the fractal images that have that sort of lacy-spiky characteristic, there’s a good probability that it’s created with an orbit trap.

The math is pretty simple, I did a major reworking of complex function fractals in Genetic Image so that they’re possible, and it’s possible to do a number of other interesting things. My main complaint with them is that the performance is still really terrible, as compared to Perlin fractal noise so I tend to bypass complex fractals a lot of the time. They also don’t have very many outputs, so they don’t show up very often unless they’re heavily weighted.

I am going to spend a little bit more time getting interesting effects, and seeing if I can encourage the traps to appear, create other interesting behavior. Also I’ll need to do a few more bug fixes. Always the bug fixes.

Also, for those who are curious: the image to the right was created using a very very quick Processing prototype, and the code for it is here.