It’s been some time in the mak­ing, but I believe it’s ready for a first appear­ance: the new strange sym­me­try ren­derer. But wait, don’t go just yet. There are a few caveats.

The online ver­sion and the fea­tured code are not com­plete. I’ve had to cut out some fea­tures to get the mem­ory usage down to a browser friendly ver­sion. Basi­cally I had two options: reduce the res­o­lu­tion or limit the stored infor­ma­tion. I went for the lat­ter. Per­son­ally I’d hate to lose the fine struc­ture of the fea­tured attrac­tors. This would have defeated the whole pur­pose of the code.

Lim­it­ing the stored infor­ma­tion has one major impact on appear­ance, there’s no color in this ver­sion. Right back to plain old black and white…

The applet oper­ates in 5 modes: (1) the ini­tial explorer, (2) active ren­der and dis­play, (3) geom­e­try and attrac­tor con­trols, (4) bright­ness con­trol and (5) stealth mode for fast updates. Switch modes by press­ing the appro­pri­ate num­ber (where applic­a­ble). Press ‘1’ in the ini­tial explorer to gen­er­ate a new set. After ini­tial tweak­ing, I rec­om­mend run­ning the con­struct in stealth mode to get the fastest results. While in stealth mode the dis­play is not auto­mat­i­cally updated. Click to update the render.

You can save the gen­er­ated image in modes (2) and (4), the only modes that show the actual image. Sav­ing freezes the applet and opens the image in a new win­dow. On some sys­tems this may take some time.