JWildfire - the powerful, flexible and user-friendly fractal flame editor

Introduction

JWildfire is a very powerful and flexible flame fractal generator that has been battle-tested by numerous fractal artists from all over the world. As the spiritual successor of the award-winning special effects program Wildfire\7PPC for the Amiga, its roots go back about 25 years. The software is java-based and runs on almost any platform. It might not be as fast as native application, but it runs rock-solid and allows the rendering of huge images. An alternative GPU renderer is available. It is currently limited, but will be expanded continuously.

Key Features

• extremely versatile, stable and fast
• offers lots of features and options, most of the parameters can be animated by motion-curves/keyframes
• comes with a visually appealing graphical user interface which was designed to explore the fractal realm in a very playful way (by using the mouse rather than entering numerical values)
• was designed to be as user-friendly as possible, for example, has complete undo/redo and has a lot of options which may be customized in the Preferences
• contains about 800 variations/formulas (Java-version) -the GPU-extension supports about 500 variations/formulas, which where actually tested to behave the same as the cpu-version
• has lots of random-flame-generators which produce nice fractals forms as starting point for your own creations
• contains numerous sub-modules like
  • MutaGen: for creating mutations of existings frames
  • Interactive/Infinite renderer
  • Dancing Flames: sound-synchronized animation of parameters
  • Quilt Renderer: for rendering really huge images
• offers a Java-based scripting-interface which easily lets you create your own fractals-generators
• comes with a comprehensive user manual
• continuous development/improvement since the last 10 years
• open source

Public builds

Currently, all public builds are available at https://jwildfire.overwhale.com

Paid Steam/App Store versions

There are special releases on Steam and the App Store. Those versions are meant for users who do not want to deal with installing and maintaining a Java runtime and want to receive automatic updates.
They must be paid once (about 10 EUR) and users will receive all updates for free.

This is a nice way to support the further development of this software, but completely optional. You can always download the free version or build it on your own. So, by buying from Steam/App Store, you are basically paying for the service that the platforms offer you, and not for the software itself.

Contribute

Feel free to contact me at thargor6@googlemail.com

License

Copyright (C) 1995-2021 Andreas Maschke

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This software is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with this software; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA, or see the FSF site: http://www.fsf.org.