hi :) I've gotten fairly interested in fractals for generating patterns and surfaces for 3d images. I'm playing with some freeware apps now getting the feel for what I can do with fractals as a part of my 3d toolkit, and was wanting some advice as to what commercial software might flesh out my interest a bit more. interested in your experiences with the different software, good and bad, so I can make a decision as to what to buy :)

There are so much excellent freeware generator aveleble, my advice; play and understand them, you'll have months of pleasure and you'll learn fractal with them after may be you'll buy a commercial generator. To start try Fractalvizion, Cold_IFS, Tierazon 2.8 or 2.9, FractalExplorer, Sterlingware, Vchira, ChaoPro and many other I put them in order of ease to use in my opinion.

oh, you mentioned some I haven't found yet, thanks! I found a plugin for IFS for PovLab (a flavour of PovRay) by now too, and what I saw done with it looks VERY cool, but I haven't tried it yet. (has anyone else?) I realise now that UltraFractal and Xenodream have no export capabilities for meshes. (though Xenodream says they will add it in a future version) I'm using FractalExplorer quite a lot now and I'm enjoying it. I have discovered that it can generate obj terrains from fractals but it coughs out when I set the size too high. :(