Russ 3D Hybrids

Etude Number

5

Basic Details

6ft, 70kg

Your name

Russell Etheridge

Your Pathway Combination

Digital Arts Specialist

The title of your etude

Animated Fractal Experiments

A short statement of intentions

I have always had an interest in fractals, the beautiful mathematically generated art and their striking similarity to the biological life that we find all over the planet. I have used various fractal generators over the years, even one that someone scripted in Visual Basic (it was actually really good!). I recently discovered Ultrafractal – Animation Edition that allows you to not only create fractal based on your own mathematical formulae, but also animate all the properties and render it to your computer. Thus as a fifth etude I plan to get a handle on the animation functions in this software.

Describe and depict what the actual concept of the etude is

The interesting thing about fractals is that although they are mostly displayed in as a 2D representation, they can be expanded to infinity. Due to this it can be argued that they have depth loosely classifying it as a 3D object. There have been 3D representations of the common fractal formulas but I haven’t found any particularly interesting attempts at it.
I believe that we find fractal images innately beautiful due to the fact that it closely resembles patterns found in nature. So by taking this concept and attempting to animate these beautiful images it will give a good platform for inspiring content in more conventional animations.

Documentation of Technical and Artistic Process

I have produced two separate animation experiments using Ultrafractal. They can be found in the following posts along with some blurb about how they were created:

Fractal Animation

Fractal Animation 2

References

All the research and links I have done during the creation of this etude can be found in the following post category:

Fractals

How successful is the etude?

The main drawback while producing these animations was the fact that I only have a 30 day trial of the application. As a result, as I am sure you are aware of if you have viewed the videos, that the words ‘evaluation copy’ is strewn over any image you export from the application. This makes it impossible to use the images for anything apart from tests and experiments. Despite this problem I feel as though the tests were quite successful. I would love to get my hands on the full version of this software and implement some fractal animations into other kinds of animation I am producing. If I can it would be good to play around with adding parts of this to my final project.