level 17 dragon

Fractal Grower

Java Software for Growing Lindenmayer Substitution Fractals (L-systems).

By Joel Castellanos, Department of Computer Science, University of New Mexico
Funding for continued development of Fractal Grower is being provided by the Fractal Foundation of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

An L-system is a formal grammar most famously used to model the growth processes of plants. Changes to the gallery of preset parameters will quickly yield beautiful fractal images of such variety that it is unlikely what you create has ever been seen before. Save your creations and add them to the gallery.


Download Click here to download and/or run FractalGrower in the JRE Version 2010-03. After downloading, find the directory where you saved FractalGrower.jar. Double click on it to run FractalGrower.

Fractal Grower requires Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 1.5 or newer.

Going Deeper: You can take the patterns to a greater number of levels by running FractalGrower with more memory: from the command prompt, change to the download directory and use the command: java -Xmx135m -jar FractalGrower.jar


level 17 dragon
L90 R120
Level 17 of the Dragon - a Paper Folding Fractal pattern that results from folding a strip of paper exactly in-half seventeen times, and then opening it up so that each fold makes a 90° angle.
Level 11 of a Paper Folding Fractal that results from Alternating between folding to the Left at 90° and then to the Right at 120°. Always folding exactly in-half.

fern 1 fern 1 fern 1 fern 1 fern 1
Levels 1 through 5 of an L-system fractal with the substitution rule: f=![+++++f][-------f]-![++++f][------f]-![+++f][-----f]-!f

Paper Folding Fractals:

L-Systems:



Further Reading:

The paper folding part of the software and documentation are based on a lecture given at Rice University in the spring of 1994 by Heinz-Otto Peitgen of the CeVis Research Center at the University of Bremen, Germany. CeVis is well known for its many documents concerning Chaos Theory and Fractal Geometry. Several books are available which offer an easy-to-understand introduction to these topics. Besides that, there are several video films available.
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