Playing around with the dragon fractal

Some experiments with my favorite fractal!


Recently I’ve been playing around with the Dragon Fractal and wanted to make my own implementation with customizable parameters to see if I could make some visually interesting results. You can see a basic dragon fractal generator below - press start to start the iterations.


Some interesting looking angles to try above: \(90\), \(91\), \(95\), \(85\). You’ll need to refresh between every input.

Although the input above is in terms of degrees, for the remainder of this post I’ll be referring to angles in radians. Also, the zooming out feature isn’t perfect, so you may see artifact generated from where the camera is zooming out slower than the fractal. You can see this especially with large angles. In general, I’m not really happy with how the zoom looks, but it’s good enough for me to call it done.

While implementing this, I tried having non-constant angles of rotation. Below you can see what happens when the angles of rotation are increasing multiples of \(\pi/3\). Click start below to watch. Or, click here for a video instead.

Here’s the same thing for increasing multiples of \(\pi/4\). Click start below to watch. Or, click here for a video instead.

Written on September 30, 2020