ShipBuilder linked a few days ago to a strange attractor program called chaoscope. I knew the existence of strange attractors before, but only as weird mathematical objects and never realized there could be a practical interest for them. Well, i was wrong. When i saw the images created with chaoscope, i realized many of them were looking like volumetric nebulaes, a topic that i already investigated, if you remember my journal updates, maybe a year ago.

Anyway, i quickly started to google for informations about the "maths" behind strange attractors, and it's surprizingly simple; technically, it's just a function that generates a cloud point, each point beind a function of the previous point and of a parameter set. The "hard" part is to determine the parameters that will generate strange attractors automatically, or in our case, nice looking nebulaes ( and i've yet to do that, even though i have some ideas ).

Here's the result of a few hours of playing around:



Of course, rendered in real time ( and still a bit grainy ).