What Fractalize does
Your picture is the material. Each pattern is a map that decides, for every pixel on the screen, where in your picture to look: fold the plane into six wedges and the picture becomes a rosette; run a Julia map first and it becomes filaments; push it down a log-polar tunnel and it flies at you forever. The map runs again every frame with the music in its constants, so the scene keeps changing with the song.
The infinite zooms and deep fractals run the fractal’s own equation at every pixel and take their colour from your picture, so a Mandelbrot dive comes out in the colours of your photo.
In the Studio each pattern is a picture look, a look like any other in the looks list. Every one comes with a picture of its own, a frame from a video made in Groovalizer. Add your own picture and it plays through all of them instead. The fractal music visualizer guide covers the fractal presets that need no picture.
| Kind | Patterns | What it does to the picture |
|---|
| Infinite zoom | 20 | Dive forever into the Mandelbrot or Julia set, a Mandelbox or an Apollonian gasket. Each level repeats the last exactly, so the detail never runs out. |
| Deep fractals | 23 | The same fractals held in place and morphing with the song, plus Wada mirrors, the Zaslavsky web and the Hofstadter butterfly. |
| Folds | 20 | Mirror the picture into wedges and nest the copies: hexagonal, Apollonian, Sierpinski, Penrose, Mandelbox. |
| Lenses | 10 | Bend it through complex maps such as Mobius, Joukowski and the exponential, so straight edges curve. |
| Tilings | 16 | Repeat it across a moving grid: moire, quasicrystal, Voronoi cells, Truchet arcs. |
| 3D shapes | 6 | Wrap it around a rendered solid: a torus, a knot, a Menger slab, a gyroid shell. |
| Classic fractals | 11 | Let Newton, Julia, Burning Ship and Phoenix iterations decide where each pixel looks. |
| Flows | 26 | Push it along a field: log-polar tunnels, Droste zooms, vortex twists, Clifford and De Jong attractors. |
| Projections | 4 | Map it onto a sphere, a floor in perspective, or a tesseract. |
| Curves | 15 | Bend it along rose curves, Cassini ovals, spirographs and Lissajous weaves. |
151 patterns of 10 kinds, counted from the tables the Studio ships. The looks list mixes them in with the other looks, zooms first. Most kinds take their names from the mathematics; you do not need to know it to use them.
Want one to wear? Fractal Fashion takes the same picture looks, freezes the moment you pick and prints it edge to edge on a hoodie, tee or pair of pants.
Make one in five steps
- 1.Open a picture look. Click Open Fractalize on this page. The Studio opens on a picture look, Mandelbox Zoom on a first visit, with Adjust open and its Picture row asking for your picture.
- 2.Add your picture. Click Use your own and choose a JPG, PNG or WebP, or click the camera button and take a snapshot. Use your own picture in the Create tab does the same, and on a computer you can also drop an image anywhere on the Studio or choose Use your own picture from ⌘K (Ctrl+K on Windows). Groovalizer measures the picture first; if it is low in contrast or pale, it switches on Boost colour and contrast, and you can turn that off.
- 3.Pick a look. Your picture now plays through every picture look. In the looks list under the stage they carry a small picture badge; type “fractalize” into the search to list only them, then step through them with the arrows on the stage. They come in 10 kinds, from endless zooms to 3D shapes.
- 4.Tune it. Adjust holds the controls for the look on stage. Reacts to the music sets how hard the song pushes it, Speed sets how fast it morphs (slow reads best), the colour swatches turn it round the colour wheel, and Shuffle tries a fresh mix of its settings. Fine-tune holds the rest in groups for Picture, Motion and Shape. The zooms and deep fractals add Finish, and their Picture group sets which part of your picture paints them and can weave in a second picture.
- 5.Save it and make the video. Choose Save a copy to Yours from the three-dot menu in Adjust. The copy keeps your picture and its settings, and from Yours it plays with any song, takes a part in Song parts and becomes a video with Make video: 720p free with a watermark, up to 1080p on a bought video or Pro, or 4K on Unlimited.
Your picture and your account
Groovalizer prepares the picture on your device: it resizes it to at most 2048 pixels on its long edge, boosts it if you asked, and writes it straight into the running engine. Signed out, that is where it stays, and a look you save keeps working in this browser.
Signed in, Groovalizer saves the prepared copy to your account under a name made from its content, so it stores the same picture once no matter how many looks you save with it, and a saved look opens with its picture on any device you sign in from.
Pictures that work
Colour and contrast survive folding; fine detail does not. A bold poster, a saturated sunset, a face against a plain wall or a piece of your own artwork gives the patterns edges to work with. A dim phone photo turns to mud, which is why Groovalizer measures colourfulness, saturation and contrast when a picture lands and switches on Boost colour and contrast for weak ones.
Faces and text become geometry. If you want the subject to stay recognisable, open Fine-tune, then Picture, and raise Show the picture itself, so the fractal frames it instead of replacing it.
Free to play, free to export at 720p
Everything up to the export is free: your picture, the 151 picture looks, their settings, playing them with your track or a microphone, and saving them to Yours. A free account turns one into a 720p file with a small watermark. A clean video is $4.99 on its own, or Pro makes 8 videos a month, up to 1080p, for $14.99 a month or $144 a year; Unlimited makes every video you want, up to 4K, for $29.99 a month or $240 a year. Files are MP4 (WebM in Firefox) at 30 or 60 frames per second, in 16:9, 9:16, 1:1 or 4:5.
Rendering happens on your machine, so a long video takes as long as your hardware takes.
Where it goes next
A look you save goes to Yours, next to the looks you have made or hearted, and keeps your picture and its settings. It plays like any other look: with Song parts on it can take the chorus while a calmer look plays the verse, it can play to your microphone, or it can carry the whole song as a music visualizer video.
Album art through a Droste zoom makes a release visual in your own colours. A band photo through a six-fold mirror makes a tour poster that moves.