Fractorium Tips

A collection of miscellaneous tips for making your usage of Fractorium as productive and interesting as possible.

UI responsiveness

While using Fractorium, you may notice the UI can have a somewhat sticky and unresponsive feel if you try to use it before the interactive renderer completes. The reason for this is that despite it being against all best practices, the rendering processing is done on the UI thread. So if you are trying to click […]

Precision

Users might be confused by the notion of single vs. double precision used throughout this site and in Fractorium. They refer to two different data types used inside the program for performing calculations. The reason for supporting both dates back to the original flam3 code. Its authors experimented with different types to see what kind of […]

Render errors and crashing

Your usage of Fractorium should be free of rendering errors and program crashes. However, there might be a bug in the particular version you are using so this section details how to proceed when problems occur. The most severe situation is a program crash. In this case you will want to immediately recover what you […]

Sizing

You will likely render many images and different sizes depending on where you want your final image to be seen/used. While editing, you will want to use different sizes depending on the stage of editing you are at. This article gives guidance on how to use the various sizing mechanisms within Fractorium. The first stage […]

Palettes

Palettes are stored in an Xml, Gradient or Ugr files and Fractorium comes with several of each. If you would like to add more palettes, you can copy them to the program installation folder (or ~/.config/fractorium on Linux). The next time you run Fractorium, you will see them added to the palettes combo box. Here […]

Memory and strips

Rendering a fractal flame takes quite a bit of memory so it’s important to take time to carefully consider how much memory you are using relative to how much is available on your system. As a general rule, CPUs have more memory than GPUs so memory will be less of a concern on the former. […]

Scale vs. zoom

You will notice two fields named Scale and Zoom in the Geometry table on the Flame tab. These can both be used to make the image zoom in or out, but do different things internally. This article clarifies the differences and offers recommendations on their usage. When fractal flames are zoomed in, they will degrade in […]