Nebula Flame

Fractal flames are an iterated function system rendered with log-density coloring, developed by Scott Draves in 1992. A small set of affine transformations is applied repeatedly to a moving point, but each transformation can be composed with a nonlinear variation — sinusoids, spherical inversions, polar maps — that warps the result into organic, luminous forms. The log-density rendering, in which brightness scales with how often each pixel was visited, gives the images their characteristic glow and depth. Every image in this collection is computed from a specific set of transformations and variations, with millions of iterations driving each pixel value. The result feels painterly but is entirely the consequence of the underlying IFS algebra.