... Montage will have a great deal of educational impact and value, as well as fulfilling its purpose for artistic creation. ... allows you to simulate and construct natural objects and forms of practically infinite variety ... with remarkable ease and speed. ... incredibly well finished ... efficiently coded ... able to render fractally generated objects and scenes in a matter of seconds, except for the most complex interations. ... strips away the mystery and confusion which surrounds the science of fractals and lets the layest of laymen not only produce marvellous imagery but also develop a grasp of this intriguing field of mathematics. Acorn User

Montage, written by Michael Rozdoba, provides what may be a unique path into the world of fractals. It enables the complexities of fractal geometry to be explored easily as an art form, by the creation of simple or complex pictures, and be fully understood as a mathematical process. Pictures of objects or scenes can be created by users with little or no knowledge of mathematics.

You can click this image to get a bigger (63K) image or have a even larger image (292K).

You can click this image to get a bigger (35K) image or have a even larger image (405K).

Remember that these images can all be rendered with precision from just one image description, you choose the size Montage will render it. Not only that but with Montage you can zoom-in on a portion of an image and have that rendered in complete detail as well -- it's the miracle of Fractals:

You can click this image to get a bigger (35K) image of this detail of the sunflower image.

Here's what the program author and creator of these two images had to say about the Joshua Tree:

This IFS and its associated images are no more sophisticated than the earlier Sunflower field example.However the Joshua Tree IFS is the first I created based directly on a real-world scene rather than on yet another already-fractal picture.

For the record, the source image which proved the inspiration for JoshuaTree (it is not a precise copy) can be found in:

"Radio Times, 18-24 March 1995, page 65"

The caption to which reads:

"The Joshua tree casts a welcome shadow over
the scorched landscape of the Mojave desert"

This relates to the programme 'Keepers of the Kingdoms - Desert Song', a wildlife documentary about life in California's Mojave Desert (which made use of U2's music - hence the emphasis on the Joshua tree).

Note that creation of this IFS took me the best part of a very long afternoon, though much of this was spent not on design of the basic components of the IFS, but on tweaking them and the layout in order to get the best possible aesthetic balance given my limited artistry.

The program comes complete with a 70-page manual, a 20-page tutorial and an on-disk guide on how to generate superb fractuals. These include the steps needed to do produce a collage of a field of sunflowers.

Montage is a RISC OS application. It requires a minimum of 2Mb for practical applications, and 4Mb for hi-res colour work.

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