Flam3 is a CPU based Flame fractal renderer developed by Scott Draves, Erik Reckase, and others. It is the renderer used by the Electric Sheep project. It is licensed under the GNU Public License version 3.

Flam3 can be used as a plugin renderer on Snow Leopard only. Lion sandboxing of Mac App Store applications prevents its use by Fractal Architect on Mac OS X Lion.

Flam3 is not bundled with Fractal Architect 2. Its use is entirely optional and is not required in any way to use the application. It does offer Xaos rendering support, so usage of that rendering feature does require the Flam3 renderer. In a future update, Xaos support is planned for the Flam4 OpenCL based renderer included with Fractal Architect 2.

Flam4 OpenCL and CUDA renderers do not produce exactly the same image as those created with the Flam3 renderer plugin. The internal algorithms vary - Flam4 is a GPU acceleration optimized renderer.

Where to Get Flam3

Pre-built executables for Flam3 can be downloaded from: Flam3 executables.

When downloaded, your Downloads directory will contain a folder called Flam3-executables-3.0.1

Installing the Flam3 Rendering plugin -- Snow Leopard only

• Create this new directory in Fractal Architect 2's Application Support directory:     ~/Library/Application Support/FractalArchitect2/flam3/
• Using the Mac Finder, copy the files from your Downloads' Flam3-executables-3.0.1 directory into the flam3 directory you just created.
• Restart Fractal Architect. You can switch to the Flam3 renderer on the Preferences => Render Options tab.