Reading a book about fractals I saw an image of a fractal that looked pretty much the same as the ones I was getting with Frax4D. These were called quaternions. Now that I knew what I was actually dealing with I did a quick google search and found the freeware Quat. It was much more powerful than Frax4D and also more open to animation. Although it was only a single image generator it was open enough for me to write a small plugin that was feeding Quat with parameters for animation sequences. Furthermore you could choose between four different formulas. Below are some examples.

It was in 2000 or 2001 when a friend showed me the Frax4D Photoshop filter that was part of Kai’s Power Tools 5 (or KPT 5 in short). I was very much fascinated by the alien forms and shapes it was capable of creating. The first thought I had was that it would be interesting to do an animation with it. So I created some short clips using Frax4D (see below). It was rewarding and frustrating at the same time. The interface was not very good for animation. The values were all changed with sliders and you couldn’t enter numeric values. But I liked the results I got.