Mikael Hvidtfeldt Christensen released the first stable version of Fragmentarium, a free application for exploring generative 3D art.

Fragmentarium was introduced in early 2011 primarily as means of studying Distance Estimated systems. And indeed, over the last few years Mikael wrote a lot of interesting articles on generative graphics and 3D rendering in his blog, most notably — the “Distance Estimated 3D Fractals“ series. Pretty much all of them are based on his experiments with Fragmentarium.

Initially the project was inspired by Adobe's Pixel Bender. However, instead of using a custom kernel language it relies on good ol’ GLSL, and the user interface shares quite a few design decisions with Structure Synth — an earlier project by Mikael.

Fragmentarium provides quite a lot of flexiblity for artistic expression. Do you fancy lost civilizations?

The Infinitely Divided Highway to Fractal Insanity by FractKali

Or maybe industrial interiors?

Manufactory by Crist JRoger

How about organic fractal lifeforms?

Life as we don't know it by FractKali

While Fragmentarium focuses on 3D fractal systems, it’s also quite good for 2D fractals.

Tempestuous Tides by timemit

And you can generate rather interesting animations:

The project hasn’t been very active in the last year, and the changes since v0.9.12 are a bit on the minor side:

simplified rendering interaction with just progressive and animation mode;

animations can finally be rendered at arbitrary resolution and using multiple subframes;

a new progress dialog makes it possible to abort rendering;

buffers can have a different aspect ratio and size from the OpenGL window;

the application got a new sigmoid tone mapper.

If you are a Windows user, you can grab your build. Mac and Linux users are suggested to fetch the source code from GitHub.

For more examples of artworks visit Flickr and DeviantArt.