Filed under: Fractals
I found a great fractal animaiton on You Tube. It doesnt really explain how it was made, just gives this big long blurb about lsd. Check it out:
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:
References
All the research and links I have done during the creation of this etude can be found in the following post category:
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.
Filed under: Fractals
I have created a second fractal animation. This time I was experimenting with the formula that makes up the Mandelbrot set. It is possible to create some very interesting effects with small changes to the numbers. Ultrafractal is very good to let you animate all these values. However the “evaluation copy” sign is very irritating and I still haven’t figured out how to make the key frame interpolation totally smooth, it seems to do it under its own discretion!
I also made this animation loopable. Once it reaches the end it will seamlessly loop back to the beginning (if you had the play settings on loop that is).
You can download the animation here:
Filed under: Fractals
Imagine a really cool fractal image here (you can’t link to the pictures in the gallery they have really strict copyright rules)
Gallet has explored the beauty of fractals in great depth. Her website contains multiple galleries containing various explorations in Ultrafractal and other fractal software. It is well worth a look, many of the works look more like paintings than mathematically generated images!
Filed under: Fractals
I have created a quick animation using the Ultrafractal software. It is more advanced than I initially predicted. You can animate most of the settings controlling the fractal display. I have produced an excursion down the classic Mandelbrot set. I then adjusted the footage in After Effects. To my surprise you are capable of using interpolation (easing of motion) on the key frames in Ultrafractal and you can even add motion blur to the movements. It doesn’t give you much control over the interpolation, I couldn’t figure out how to make the key frames run smoothly between one another, it would only ease in and out of each frame stopping at every step.
Unfortunately they are not that generous with their evaluation version of Ultrafractal and subsequently slap “evaluation copy” all over your images.
You can download the QT animation below.
Filed under: Fractals
The above image was created using a programme I recently installed called Ultrafractal. I only have a 30 day trial at the moment, but it seems pretty good. I have the animation edition so I will see what kind of motion you can produce with this.
I have always had an interest in these beautiful mathmatically generated artworks. I have recently been exploring fractals created in 3D. I have found a PDF file written by Dominic Rochon that seems to be a university lecture on the history of fractals and creating them in 3D. The problem is that it is all explained in bullet points and nothing is explained. You can however get the jist of the information and it is fairly interesting. You can get the PDF here:
Whilst looking into 3D fractals, I stumbled upon this web page that contains a java applet displaying 3d fractals that you can view as an anaglyph with 3D glasses. At the bottom of this page are some links to other anaglyph applets.
