Fractales

Description

This repos contains a personnal project created within one week. It can generate fractals pictures based on a Julia Set, and explore such a fractal in real time (zoom in and out, go left, right, up and down). It generates two executables: FractalesJulia.exe and FractalesUI.exe. The first one creates a picture (.png) of a fractal, and the second one is in real time.

Here is an example of fractals I generated.

The first fractal I generated. The seed of the Julia set is z² - 3/4.

An interesting fractal, from the suite z² + c with c = 0.285 + 0.013i.

This project was then extended, after I learned how to use OpenGL. I used my GLSL knowledge to implement an equivalent running on native OpenGL, which is way more optimized. This project allows to control the fractal in real time, as well as zooming in and out in said fractal. It implements a color system as well. This is the FractalesUI-OpenGL subfolder, which compiles on Linux and macOS to create a fractales executable.

A screenshot of the FractalesUI-OpenGL window, showing the fractal in red, a grey gradient for the diverging speed, as well as the UI on the top left allowing to control the fractals parameters.

Solution organization

There are currently three projects integrated in the "Fractale" solution:

• FractalesJulia: A starting C# project that generates and saves an image of a fractal.
• FractalesUI: A real time graphical interface for exploring the generated fractals, and (if I continue this project one day) beeing able to change the Julia set. It is implemented in C++, and using SFML.
• CUDAShader: A project implementing code parallelization (executing on NVIDIA GPUs) for the former projects. It is written in CUDA and compiles into a .dll file.

The BuildTools folder contains post-build scripts.

The FractalesUI-OpenGL folder contains the OpenGL implementation of the fractal viewport.

Execution

These projects require the following settings to run correctely:

• FractalesJulia: Windows executable. It needs .NET framework installed. It will run faster if CUDAShader works and compiles properly, but can execute without it anyway.
• FractalesUI: Windows executable. Needs an NVIDIA GPU and Cuda installed. The Cuda files must be located at C:\Program Files\NVIDIA GPU Computing Toolkit\CUDA\v11.8\ (or you'll have to recompile). If your GPU's generation is not an RTX 2080 Ti or higher, you'll have to recompile as well.
• FractalesUI-OpenGL: Linux or macOS executable. Windows hasn't been tested.

Compilation

Here are requirments for a successful compilation:

• FractalesJulia: needs .NET framework.
• FractalesUI: needs SFML. You can download it here. It goes in the Libraries folder. See the LIBS_README for more informations.
• CUDAShader: Needs an NVIDIA GPU and Cuda installed. The Cuda files must be located at C:\Program Files\NVIDIA GPU Computing Toolkit\CUDA\v11.8\include (or you'll have to change the compilation configuration of the project). If you don't have an RTX 2080 Ti or higher (supporting sm_75), change the corresponding compilation setting to compute_52,sm_52 (or less if needed) in the CUDAShader project properties CUDAShader -> Cuda C/C++ -> Device -> Code Generation.
• FractalesUI-OpenGL: first install cmake, and the dependencies (OpenGL, GLFW, GLEW, GML). Download the external libraries files by running the FractalaesUI-OpenGL/SRC/ExternalLibs/download.sh script. Then create a build folder FractalesUI-OpenGL/build and cd into it, run cmake .. then make. The fractales executable is then compiled and linked.