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 seven 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 result is a moving scene rather than a filter.
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.
| Group | 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 in 10 groups, counted from the tables the Studio ships. Most groups are named after the mathematics; you do not need to know it to use them.
Make one in five steps
- 1.Open Fractalize. Click Fractalize in the header, or open the Studio and pick it from the menu. It opens as a drawer beside the stage with a sample picture already loaded, so the patterns are never blank tiles.
- 2.Pick a picture. Drop in a JPG, PNG or WebP, or take a snapshot with your camera. The picture is measured on your device; if it is flat or dim, a colour and contrast boost switches on to help, and you can turn it off.
- 3.Choose a pattern. Click any of the 151 patterns and it plays on the stage at once, with your picture inside it. They sit in 10 groups, from endless zooms to 3D shapes. Click the playing pattern again to open its settings.
- 4.Tune it. Customise holds the settings for whatever is playing, and each change dissolves in over about a second. On the folds, lenses and the other families, Tempo sets how fast the pattern morphs (slow reads best), Scale moves it in or out, Show original mixes your picture back in, and Symmetry mirrors it into wedges. The zooms and deep fractals have their own set: which part of your picture paints them, a second picture woven in, the shape and how hard the music pushes it, symmetry, and a finish from glow to vignette.
- 5.Save and export. Save to my presets keeps it in your library under Mine. From there it plays with any track, takes a section on the timeline, and exports as MP4 at up to 4K on Pro.
Your picture and your account
The picture is prepared on your device: resized to at most 2048 pixels on its long edge, boosted if you asked, and written straight into the running engine. Signed out, that is where it stays, and a pattern you save keeps working in this browser.
Signed in, the prepared copy is saved to your account under a name made from its content, so the same picture is stored once no matter how many patterns you save with it, and a saved preset 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 the panel measures colourfulness, saturation and contrast when a picture lands and switches on the boost for weak ones.
Faces and text become geometry. If you want the subject to stay recognisable, raise Show original and let the fractal frame it instead of replacing it.
Free to play, Pro to export
Everything up to the export is free: the picture, the 151 patterns, the settings, playing it with your track or a microphone, and saving it to your presets. Turning it into a file takes Pro, $14.99 a month or $144 a year, with the first 7 days free: MP4 (WebM in Firefox) at 30 or 60 frames per second, in 16:9, 9:16 or 1:1, up to 4K.
Rendering happens on your machine, so a long video takes as long as your hardware takes.
Where it goes next
A saved Fractalize preset lives under Mine with everything else you have saved, so it behaves like any other preset: give it the chorus on the timeline and a calmer scene the verse, play it from a microphone at a show, or export the whole song with it.
Album art through a Droste zoom makes a release visual that is unmistakably yours. A band photo through a seven-fold mirror makes a tour poster that moves.