> I miss the "fractal look" in the 3D edges and such. Guess it looks more like an extruded 2D fractal and a 3D fractal.
Thanks for the comment as it is a great lead in to the image I am posting today. You are exactly right about the daisy fractal. It is very geometric looking and at first I even wondered if it is a fractal and not just a geometric shape. I think it is a fractal because with different parameters it has intricate detail. If anyone would like to experiment with the daisy fractal, you can find it in the fract18.par file included with FractInt. I chose the daisy fractal for testing because it is really fast and it only takes about 1 second to generate the model.
That brings us to todays image which is a model which no one would question is a true fractal. The one I picked for today is a 3D version of The_Birth_of_Light which is Jim Muth's FOTD for May 6, 2012. You can find Jim's original image at:
This fractal has great colors and a lot of iteration bands which make good 3D models. Like yesterday, the model was generated in Fracton and rendered in Cheetah 3D.
When I did this image back in May I was working on fixing some of the artifacts. You don't have to look too closely to see some parts of the model are missing. The model also needs to be generated with a higher resolution. Later versions of the code fixed some of the artifacts but made the models take even longer to make. This one took hours and would likely take days if I tried to do it over at a higher resolution. Still, once you have a 3D model it is easy to "fly" through it in a 3D program like Cheetah 3D. The following link is a 10 second 33 Mb HD Quicktime movie (broadband recommended).
One final comment about the extruded look of Fracton's models. These are "height field" models where the height of the model corresponds to the index used to color the image. Usually the index is the number of iterations but can be different depending on the coloring method you pick. So yes these are really 2D fractal models with a 3rd dimension of height. Some fractals are really surprising and look totally different in 3D than you would expect. Generating a true 3D fractal could use some of the same code but would need to handle the extra dimension.
