I have recently discovered something... I LOVE fractals! I have always thought they made really neat desktops, but this year my wall calendar at work is fractals too. I'm hooked.

So, I decided I wanted to try to make some of my own. I started reading about how they are created and it sounded kind of complicated, but surely you don't have to do all the calculating of the formulas by hand. I found some software, Ultra Fractal 3, that some one on a fractal site recommended for beginners and downloaded it.

I am completely overwhelmed! I am a few pages into the tutorial and my mind is just spinning in circles! There is so much to manipulate and control, and I don't know how I am ever going to get good at this.

For those of you who create fractals, how did you start? Is there, like, Fractals 101 out there anywhere? Am I completely abnormal and should I just give up?

UltraFractal is about the easiest to use program on the market right now. There do exist very simple programs that only produce Mandelbrot Set images, however even they usually have loads of variables that you can manipulate. I suggest staying with the Mandelbrot set and just zooming around in it for a while. They slowly start changing one variable at a time to see what effect it has.

agreed, i started out just by putting mandelbrot on switch mode, and makin cool julia pics

Thanks, guys... I'll keep at it then. I am sure I will get the hang of it eventually.

I don't understand what a fractal is... they look cool but what are they?

Most are simply projections of the solution set of a mathematical relation in the complex plane.

in laymens terms, thats just a really complicated math equation that was transfromed into a picute