About This Software

JWildfireSwan ("Swan" for short) is the successor to JWildfire, a very sophisticated flame fractal generator whose roots go back some 25 years. While JWildfire is something like the Swiss army knife of flame fractals, Swan is a much more modern and streamlined application that fully supports GPU rendering.

Swan not only renders much faster, but also produces images with much better quality and much more fractal detail, as the rendering algorithm has been redefined from the ground up to not compromise on quality.

Also, fractal animation is a first-class citizen in Swan, which means that there is now a realtime aninmation player that allows you to preview the animation in real time. And, all random flames generated by the app are animated by default.

It is powered by the Godot engine and is truly cross-platform. No matter whether you are working under Linux, Windows, …​ you will always have the same experience and always have access to GPU rendering.

The application has a lean design. Therefore, it does not support all the functions you may be familiar with from JWildfire. This is to make the user interface simpler, more responsive and less complex. But you can assume that the essential functions are available. And if you are missing something, you are welcome to submit a feature request.

Key Features of JWildfireSwan

• fluid editing: real-time preview of changes to the flame attributes

• excellent support for fractal animations (all random-flames are animations by default!), also for looped animations

• really fast GPU rendering on all platforms (no more differences between CPU and GPU rendering, as there is now only GPU rendering)

• drastically improved render quality/degree of detail

• you will notice a much lower system load when rendering (unlike JWildfire, which sometimes feels like it is taking over your system).

• compatibility/interchangeability with JWildfire (you can load most of your existing flames, and can use Swan as GPU renderer from within JWildfire)

• more than 600 variations are currently supported, with more in the pipeline

• integrated sophisticated random flame and random gradient generators to play effortlessly with endless flames

• powerful flame editor that allows you to edit existing flames or create new flames from scratch and see the changes in near real time

• support for key-framed animation

• powerful motion curve editor, which allows also motion-curve-modulation, both by mathematical functions or audio spectrum (fft)

• jukebox-module for audio-spectrum-based animations of flame fractals in real time

• variation browser that interactively displays the effect of a variation and helps to understand how it works

• integrated flame-library with hundreds of curated examples created by the author of the software

• powerful curve-based gradient-editor

• integrated gradient-library with numerous of pre-defined gradient examples

• cross-platform (Linux, Windows, macOS)

• mutagen module to generate new flames by mutating existing flames

• ai img2img module to generate new images based on a flame fractal using AI

• you can extend the software by creating your own custom variations in glsl shader language

• support for audio in the flame-editor (to create audio-reactive animations)

• both high quality final rendering and realtime rendering for fast animation preview

• realtime animation preview with audio

• integration of ffmpeg to encode videos

MandelBro3D — 3D Fractal Rendering

Swan includes MandelBro3D, a full-featured 3D fractal renderer with GPU path tracing. Where the flame fractal engine works with 2D iterated function systems, MandelBro3D operates in three dimensions — rendering Mandelbulbs, Mandelboxes, Kleinian groups, and many other 3D fractal types as solid objects with physically-based lighting, materials, and shadows.

The combination of both engines in a single application is unique: Swan is both a production-grade flame fractal editor and a production-grade 3D fractal renderer. Flame fractals can even serve as sky environments or object textures inside MandelBro3D scenes, bridging both worlds.

MandelBro3D is designed for architectonic fractal art — composed scenes that combine fractal geometry with procedural primitives, boolean operations, and space deformations into deliberate compositions rendered at high visual quality.

MandelBro3D Highlights

• 212 fractal formulas across 13 categories (Mandelbulb, Mandelbox, IFS, Menger, Quaternion, Kleinian, DIFS, and more), each tested and tuned with sensible defaults. Formulas verified against Mandelbulber2 reference implementations.

• GPU path tracing with Monte Carlo integration, configurable bounce depth (1–64), progressive accumulation, and Intel OIDN denoiser support

• 5 material types: PBR (metallic/roughness), Glass (Fresnel BSDF with chromatic dispersion), Car Paint (clearcoat, metallic flakes, thin-film iridescence), Subsurface Scattering (random walk, per-channel scatter radius), and Volumetric Fire/Smoke

• 85 procedural primitives in 5 categories — 18 geometric objects, 36 ground objects (ocean, lava field, coral reef, zen garden, and many more), 20 sky objects (clouds, aurora, nebula, star field), and 13 wall objects (cyclorama, archway, colonnade, dome) — each with a raymarching-optimized signed distance function

• 163 procedural textures assignable per object across 4 channels (color, bump, emission, material map), including 3D materials, artistic patterns, nature simulations, sci-fi themes, and 2D fractal projections (Mandelbrot, Julia, Burning Ship, Lyapunov, flame fractals)

• flexible scene composition with 19 CSG/container operations: boolean union/intersection/subtraction, smooth blending, morph, spatial morph, twist, bend, elongate, domain repetition, variation deform, scatter, and point symmetry

• 616+ flame fractal variations usable as 3D space deformers, per-iteration formula warps, and procedural texture generators — the same variation library that powers the flame editor, repurposed for 3D

• hybrid fractals combining multiple formulas with 9 blend modes, plus VHybrid formulas that apply flame fractal variations as space warps within each iteration

• 6 light types (point, directional, spot, area, texture, volumetric) with soft shadows and 6 sky models (flat, hemisphere, Preetham, Hosek-Wilkie, Nishita atmospheric, flame fractal HDRI)

• procedural hair/fur on any object — strand-based SDF geometry with gravity droop, density control, and root-to-tip color gradients

• depth of field with circular, hexagonal, and octagonal bokeh shapes

• volumetric fog with Henyey-Greenstein phase function and per-light god rays

• keyframe animation on all scene attributes with motion curves, motion blur, audio-reactive modulation, and animation rendering to MP4/GIF

• custom formula authoring — write your own fractal formulas in GLSL directly in the application

• GPU-accelerated export of colored point clouds (PLY) and polygon meshes (Marching Cubes) for use in external 3D tools

• Z-buffer depth output in 16-bit EXR for compositing and Facebook 3D photos

• random batch generator for producing multiple random scenes with preview thumbnails

• 310 built-in example scenes across 21 categories

• multi-view editing with front/right/top/perspective views, transform gizmos, solo mode, and real-time preview