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