ChaosKit

ChaosKit is a set of libraries and tools to generate pictures with iterated function systems. In particular, ChaosKit is inspired by Fractal Flames and supports generating a superset of them.

How to build

To build ChaosKit, you need the following:

• a C++17 compiler (Clang, GCC, maybe MSVC 2019)
• CMake 3.6 or newer

To build the UI, you need additionally the following:

• Qt 6.1
• protobuf

Once you have the above installed, you can run the following commands to download and build ChaosKit:

git clone https://github.com/ChaosKit/ChaosKit.git
cd ChaosKit
mkdir build
cd build
# Replace Release with Debug for a debug build.
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
make

Organization

The project is organized like a monorepo, mostly because it was easier for me to build it like this. There are multiple subfolders that correspond to different libraries:

• ast — internal AST representation of function systems and helpers to define them in C++ code
• core — everything you need to evaluate the AST and gather the outputs in a buffer to eventually turn into a picture
• flame — utilities to build Fractal Flames and translate them into ChaosKit ASTs

• io — defines the input/output format for the ChaosKit UI
• library — definitions of various formulas (non-linear transformations) and coloring methods expressed in the AST
• state — a standalone UI state management library, loosely inspired by Redux, but turned out nothing like it. Supports compile-time validation of has-one and has-many relationships between structures.
• stdx — exports std::optional for older Apple Clang compilers.
• ui — QML-based GUI to edit and render Fractal Flames

License

I need to formalize this one day, but this is the intent:

Code under the ui directory is licensed under the GPLv3.

All other code is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.