Lorenz Attractor

An animated, 3D, interactive Lorenz attractor written in C with OpenGL.

This is an experiment I did a while back, figured I would open source it.

Building (OSX)

1. Run make
2. Run ./lorenz

The lorenz binary has been prebuilt on OSX.

Using

You can interact with the attractor using the following key bindings:

• q: Rotate X axis +
• a: Rotate X axis -
• w: Rotate Y axis +
• s: Rotate Y axis -
• e: Rotate Z axis +
• d: Rotate Z axis -
• r: Restart animation
• f: Finish animation
• t: Animation speed +
• g: Animation speed -
• y: Zoom Z axis +
• h: Zoom Z axis -
• UP: Rotate X axis +
• DOWN: Rotate X axis -
• LEFT: Rotate Y axis +
• RIGHT: Rotate Y axis -

Background

This program follows a trace of the Lorenz attractor points calculated within the program using the following equations:

• dx/dt = (Prandtl)(y-x)
• dy/dt = x((Rayleigh)-z)-y
• dz/dt = xy - (beta)

By default, the program has the following values:

• Prandtl = 10
• Rayleigh = 2.6666 or 8/3
• beta = 28