Features

Unrivaled image quality

The whole point of fractal art is to make beautiful images, and Chaotica puts image quality first.

Chaotica is the first fractal application to support progressive rendering and interactive HDR imaging controls, and is the only fractal application which supports perfect animation interpolation - no hacks or tricks.

Chaotica is developed by Glare Technologies, also known for
Indigo Renderer, an exceptionally high quality 3D rendering engine.

Lava Flower by Petri Kinnunen (PJfractals)

Powerful GPU rendering

Chaotica 2 introduces GPU rendering - now you can harness the massive power of modern GPUs to render fractals at maximum speed.

Chaotica supports multi-GPU rendering, meaning you can use more than one GPU at once to get even greater speed increases.

Chaotica uses the OpenCL standard, which allows it to support GPU rendering on Nvidia, AMD, and integrated graphics devices, as well as on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Dragon Circle by Petri Kinnunen (PJfractals)

Create stunning random fractals with a click

With just a click of the New random worlds button, you can generate an array of gorgeous random fractals

You can then choose one and tweak it further - changing the colour palette, transforms or more.

You don't have to be an expert to get stunning images out of Chaotica!

Random fractals in the parameter browser

Powerful editor with animation support

Chaotica comes with a fully-featured editor for creating your fractal art, with flexible and easy to use animation support.

Simply move the timeline while editing your fractal, and Chaotica will smoothly blend between the keyframes. Editing the iterator weights allows you to create complex fractal animations, with many transforms appearing and disappearing over time.

A quad-core CPU can easily preview animations in real time at 720p using the extremely fast AA level 1 preview mode.


Modern CPU rendering engine

Available on all platforms without any special hardware, Chaotica CPU rendering gets the job done fast.

Fractal computations are done in double precision, multi-core rendering is always-on and doesn't slow down your computer, 64-bit builds can access huge amounts of memory.

The incredible rendering performance is a result of both tight C++ code and new algorithms, which are simply more efficient than the widely-copied flam3 or Apophysis recipes; no amount of brute force can beat Chaotica's convergence speed.

Alpha channel export is useful in external compositing applications, providing a great source of detailed textures.

Animation by Tatyana Zabanova, based on Dewberries by Chiara Biancheri

High quality video output

New in Chaotica 2 - Chaotica can now save out high quality H.264 or HEVC (H.265) video files from your Chaotica animation.

Saving out animations to video is easy - a video file will automatically be created when your animation has finished rendering. You can tweak the video standard and bitrate as well if you wish.

Chaotica saves to the powerful industry-standard video formats H.264 or HEVC (H.265), which means you can easily import your video into other programs, or upload directly to the Web.

Video output is Windows and Mac only (no Linux support yet), but let us know if you want it on Linux.

New Mountains to Climb by Sam Himes

Apophysis / Flam3 compatibility

Chaotica supports all Apophysis / Flam3 features except the "3D hack" and Direct Colouring modifications.

Over 240 "variation" transforms are natively supported, re-implemented for higher performance and accuracy.

Any transform can be used as pre or post and can be used several times in a flam3 transform with different variables, massively extending Apophysis' fractal creation potential.


Real-time imaging controls

All imaging controls can be edited interactively without restarting the render, saving you many re-renders which would be required with other fractal applications. Chaotica also features built-in High Dynamic Range (HDR) colour curves to accurately control the colour balance in your final image.

Jaw-dropping animation frames, ideal for video compression, render very quickly using the specialised Smooth anti-aliasing mode.