Visualizing the Julia set in Java

Note: This was posted to my old blog. I’m only posting this here so I can finally delete that old abandoned git repo.

The date right there at the top is a lie. This project was a university assignment that I finished at the beginning of 2021. Nevertheless, I feel like it’s too cool to not showcase here.

Along with the code I had to submit a paper but I won’t subject anyone to that. Plenty of visualizations of sets like the Julia set or the Mandelbrot set already exist, but implementing something like this myself was well worth the effort simply because of how cool it looks.

The visualization itself only utilizes CPU rendering, but supports multithreading to bring rendering times down. Maybe I can revisit this some day and utilize the GPU instead.

Available settings:

• Two different views

  • View 1: Number of iterations determines the color

  • View 2: Number of iterations determines the brightness

• Zoom via slider or mouse wheel

• Moving around by dragging the mouse

• Adjustment of the number of iterations per coordinate

• Adjustable settings for view 2

  • Hue color

  • Brightness (useful with high number of iterations)

  • Black cut-off (useful for very high zoom levels)

Shown here is the Julia set for -0.8345 + 0.2i.

Source code for this project can be found here: 0x666690/julia