Wednesday 2 February 2011

Some Fractals

Well, I guess it's time for my first actual post, that is about something.
I am a fan of fractals and fractal art and I find the whole science behind it completely stunning!

If you don't know what fractals are you can always check good old Wikipedia.  If even after the article you still have no idea what they are, they're basically a geometric shape that's iterated (repeated) lots and lots of times while following a certain set of rules (or rather a mathematical formula). Sorry, but that's the simplest (and not very precise) explanation I could come up with.
The amazing thing about fractals is that they're LITERALLY infinite. Every time you zoom a portion of a fractal you keep revealing more and more details and the only thing, which limits you to do that zooming for all eternity are the technical limits of the machine, rendering the fractal.

The ones I'm about to show you below are actually 3D fractals. They're slightly different than conventional 2D ones (besides the fact that they're three-dimensional) and are "modeled" using different techniques but can look just as awesome, nonetheless.

Sometimes I like to play around with fractal software and experiment with different formulas and settings. If I like the result I render it and save it on my HDD. Here are some of my stuff:




The ones below are not completely rendered, because they're too complex and require waay too much time to fully complete and my machine isn't exactly a supercomputer, you know.


 ^This one for example, took more than 16 hours to get to THIS state. As you can see by the ground and some of the "towers" this is far from being completely rendered but I saved it anyways.



 The software I used to make these 3D fractals is Incendia 1.3 (only the second one was made with the newest version-1.4) and it's a small, freeware program you can download from here.

11 comments:

  1. fractals make my brain hurt when I look at them for to long..but you're right they are fascinating.

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  2. Haha! Incendia is actually pretty easy to get used to. It only took me a few days to learn all the basic stuff.

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  3. Wow if you look at these for too long you start to lose your mind.

    How to Hack Life.

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  4. That snowflake one looks trippy.

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  5. Nice, I like them. One guy at my university wrote an application that draws fractals in real time depends on parameters that were entried by user. That was amazing

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  6. Fractals make my mind blown... just stunningly beautiful.

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  7. looove fractals. the box one is especially nice, but i don't really understand the second pic. it doesn't seem infinite?

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  8. These patterns have alwasys facsinated me...

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  9. human mind loves the patterns formed by repetition..maybe we are just hard wired for this..awesome pictures...

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  10. fractal art is the coolest, thanks for the link

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