ananke_by_dorianoart

DorianoArt has a real talent for mixing fractals with photography and doing it with style.  It’s not the typical marriage between earthy fractals and leafy scenery.  It’s more like an extraterrestrial romance between mother earth and alien invaders.

Despite such a disturbing courtship, the results are quite natural, or rather, quite unnatural, a hybrid landscape, a cyborg environment of majestic mountains and expansive pixel plains.

DorianoArt’s talent is playing match-maker to two fundamentally different image types and bringing about an unexpected harmony.  They complement each other, instead of curdling each other like orange juice and milk would.  Of course it’s not for everyone, especially for those who see no natural beauty in proliferating plastic scenery.

But for those who do, you can learn a thing or two from DorianoArt’s fractal panoramas.  They involve more than just slapping a clip-art sky over a fractal.  These sorts of images require a considerable amount of pre-marital counselling.

~Click on any of the images to view full-size on their original site~

north_pole_by_dorianoart

Was he just lucky with this one, or does Doriano know something about composition and design?  The mark of a real professional is that you don’t see the marks, it all looks natural and effortless.

In case you’re thinking that this is actual snow and ice, I invite you to click on the image and view it full-size.  Then you can feast your eyes and the wondrous moire effect, the hallmark of true digital artistry.  The sky is real (you knew that, didn’t you?) and yet it blends seamlessly into the ice fields at the horizon.  And the sunlight too.

lantis_by_dorianoart

Is this the same mountain and hill from the first?  The sky is the same too.  But one barely notices this because the rolling expanse of striped cylinders draws our attention away and on down to that hazy vista of gently rolling geometry.

There is absolutely nothing natural about these striped cylinders (with purple ends).  In fact, they’re almost abstract.  Who would ever have thought of combining two things like this?  Not even Dr. Frankenstein.

radianta_by_dorianoart

There is nothing short of pure chemical joy to be found in both the chromafied sky and the pixel-gritty foreground of mercury drops.  The glass –-something— in the right midground is just a pleasant extra which, now that I notice it, leads our eye off to the vanishing point of this computerized carpet.  The moon, or is that the Earth? is conveniently located right where it is.  Who is this master of the fantastic?

You know, these images do remind me a little of the cover images for video games.  Slick, amazing alien landscapes and impossible combinations of technology and nature.  I also remember that the cover art was sometimes more impressive than the games.

It’s refreshing to see an artist who actually displays their real name on the internet.  Reminds me of the old days when people had real names and you knew who was crazy because they were the ones walking down the street waving their hands and shouting like they were on the phone.  Back to the art…

magic_wood_by_dorianoart

Oh no.  He’s gone too far with this one.  Mandelbulb, okay; and blue sky shining through the mandelbranches like in a forest, that’s okay too, but the troll kids?  Troll kids are too much.  Let’s let Doriano (I know his real name, now) explain:

Several things here starting from a wood photo in the background…(just an hour ago I was in a wonderful wood five minuts from my house) -then Mandelbulb 3D – and finally in the foreground the little people are (Gosha character) rendered with Poser 7. Final adjustments of lights in Photoimpact/Photoshop

It’s all fun and games until the Posers show up.  Creepy.

ellipsya_by_dorianoart

Doesn’t that bronze, or orange-chrome tubular thing just fit in perfectly with a south-western U.S. desert landscape?  Although, I think those objects on the horizon on the right, which are conveniently located at the vanishing point of the metal drops, are skycrapers and not buttes or rock pinacles.  A nice use of pattern, irregular objects, photo-sky and natural city scape.

You see?  I told you it wasn’t as simple as just slapping two things together.  Doriano is an artist not just a computer graphics wizard.  Son of da Vinci!

mandelbulb_sculpture_by_dorianoart

I present to you, loyal Orbit Trap readers, the Mona Lisa of our time.  Compare it with the real thing, if you’re not familiar with it.  Here we have a head-like thing in the foreground with nothing else but a dim, undetailed landscape for a background.  Of course, I don’t think Doriano intended such a allusion.  But then, did Leonardo intend his audience to fixate upon his subject’s smile?

Artist’s create but the audience interprets.  At any rate, I find it to be a richly colored and rendered mandelbulb image.  I can’t quite figure out what makes it so interesting, but as I said earlier, good art is a bit of a riddle.

The notes say “Here are two Mandelbulbs + a Terragen background for this “neoclassic” mandelbulb sculpture…..”

robotika___2__by_dorianoart

“One of the images of mine I more love returns here in another version…Hope You can appreciate it!  (mandelbulb 3D -terragen)”

Hmmn…  So the sky and mountains aren’t photographs at all,  they’re made in terragen, the artificial landscape generating program.  That’s an interesting combination, although the terragen landscapes are so realistic they might as well be photographs.

The “mandelbeetles” are an interesting element adding synthetic animal life as well as synthetic ground to the lifelike horizon and sky.  Perhaps this is their hive and they are hatching out or tending the next generation.  Of course, the truth is probably that they’re both part of the same mandelbulb image and it’s the formula that connects them.

borderline_by_dorianoart

This one is pure syntheticism.  The land is artificial and the sky, whatever it is, is not even the color, much less anything else sky-like except that it is above.  Once again, the colors are rich and multi-faceted which is a talent of computer graphics.  Moire and pixel-grit add another scale of artistry here so you’ll want to click on the image and view it full-size, that is, if you like this sort of computer abstract expressionism like I do.

future__energy_by_dorianoart

I don’t know if Doriano made the city imagery in the top, but he complemented it well with the orange energy collecting cells at the bottom.  The lighting is quite well done as if both these image areas were created together.  That’s the sort of harmony I was talking about at the beginning.

sindragosa_ii_by_dorianoart

I couldn’t find the first Sindragosa, or the first Robotika one either.  I don’t like the search function on Deviant Art.  Nothing works as well as Google.

This one makes me think of an illustration for a book, perhaps one of Sindbad’s adventures, lost in the desert and arriving suddenly at a mysterious place, which of course shines like gold.  What great looming thing is causing that shadow we’re in?

I’m sure many people will find Doriano’s mandelbulb/box renderings a little rough, but I find that stylish.  It adds a unique texture to the images and uniqueness is something that one doesn’t see much of in the fractal world; it’s just too easy for all of us to follow the same path without realizing that there’s a lot more creative potential in how you render something than what you actually render.  And you won’t get to be the leader of the pack by stepping off the trail.

Doriano’s not a formula trail-blazer or technical pioneer (as far as I know), but he’s done great things by being creative with the artwork rather than the tools, and in the end it’s that fresh approach that makes his work stand out.

Back, several postings ago, when I reviewed the latest Fractalforums.com calendar, I heaped abuse on Pauldelbrot’s image from his Mandelbrot Safari series calling it retro and not cutting-edge.  The owner of Fractalforums.com and publisher of the calendar, Christian Kleinhuis, informed me that what Pauldelbrot was doing was in fact very cutting-edge as it was utilizing new methods that enabled him to zoom to a much greater extent than had previously been possible.  And something about a new coloring method too.

From Atomic Pulp

But as an illustration of how weird fractal art as an art form can be, Pauldelbrot’s work can be kicked and abused in one review and then praised in another, just a month later as you will soon see.

Let me explain this apparently senseless thinking:  For the calendar, I didn’t think Pauldelbrot’s work had commercial appeal (as well as just about everyone else’s work in the calendar); But in this posting I present his Mandelbrot Safari images as epitomizing the pastime of fractal exploration (and a fresh example of that) as well as a good example of classic-style fractal art.

But most importantly, I rather like many of these images myself for their own sake, and the fact that they’re from the Outer Limits just enhances that.  One shouldn’t talk too much about fractal art.  Perhaps most readers have already skipped to the pictures.

The best way to follow the Mandelbrot Safari is by reading its own forum thread on Fractalforums.com.  More images, comments, etc…  Who knows?  You might even decide to buy one of the FFs 2012 calendars for no other reason than because it contains one of these Safari images.  Now wouldn’t that make me look stupid after saying they had no commercial appeal?  Buy a calendar —fight the man!

~Click on images to go to original forum thread with larger images in it~

The initial image from Pauldelbrot’s Mandelbrot Safari thread

The safari begins:  fairly common terrain we’re starting off from on May 4th, 2012.  Doesn’t look particularly promising, I must say.  But I’m not the pilot or the navigator on this expedition.  Let’s wait and see what’s over the horizon.  I’m sure he’s got some exotic destination in mind.

evdz1_008_lrg by Pauldelbrot

The game is afoot, as Sherlock Holmes would say.  That’s an odd looking color to be seeing out in this sargasso sea of yellow.  The perennial question:  Where does it go?

evdz1_017 by Pauldelbrot

I jumped ahead a few of Pauldelbrot’s image postings and here we are at the first of many “portals” to the (glittering) unknown.  If you’re anything of a fractalnaut, you ought to be getting excited right now because it looks like this trip is 1. never going to end, and 2. going to be full of surprises.

evdz1_018_lrg by Pauldelbrot

A comment:

Is that the coloring of Pauldelbrot’s image, or of this guy’s hefty signature?  (sorry, couldn’t resist; it’s the duty of everyone on the internet to stamp out signature lines and other forms of “junk mail” content)

evdz1_029_lrg by Pauldelbrot

According to the thread, we’re now zoomed into about 4 e30 magnification.  That’s 4 and thirty zeroes behind it.

evdz1_044 by Pauldelbrot

Pauldelbrot answers a tech question in the thread here about what program he’s using:

…a mix of custom and off-the-shelf code here. Time on these has increased but the latest few have taken a few hours each. The iterations are still pretty low (around 5000) but the precision bits are getting fairly numerous.

A couple hours, each?  We’re obviously on the other side of some computing sound barrier.

evdz1_090 by Pauldelbrot

Note by author:

Now over 20,000 iterations in the shallowest parts of each image, and the magnification has just passed one googol, too…

Sound sci-fi -ish, doesn’t it?  What’s a googol?  Biggy big!  So big it’s covered with big-fur!  That’s the layman’s definition. (it’s this, actually: 10¹⁰⁰)

Gets slower and slower with depth…

He’s doing this in Ultrafractal (UF) and makes this comment which sheds some light on the type of technical challenge all this is:

I should warn you that to get close to the quality results I’ve posted you’d need to use 3×3 AA, depth 2, nonadaptive AA because depth 1 isn’t enough oversampling and UF’s adaptive AA seems not to work as well as mine. The deeper images would thus need some very beefy hardware to render in anywhere near a reasonable time; or even a cluster rendering different tiles of the image per machine.

This is what Christian Kleinhuis, the owner (and sponsor) of Fractalforums.com must have meant when he told me Pauldelbrot’s image in the calendar was actually cutting edge imagery after all.

evdz1_113 by Pauldelbrot

The images are largely like this; circular and elegant, which is the sort of thing that characterizes classic fractal art –highly detailed, organized images.  I guess “complex geometric” is not a bad description, either.

Pauldelbrot says this in response to a comment about the great coloring:

It “discovers” colors, because it keeps shifting and blending them. Colors that are somewhat between pure primaries and secondaries, or somewhat desaturated as well as saturated, included, which may often be overlooked by humans doing things manually.

evdz1_204 by Pauldelbrot

“Overlooked by humans doing things manually”  Computers are more than just powerful paintbrushes.  It’s through this sort of exploration that one can develop a real appreciation for the machinery that they’re using.  That’s half the fun, I’d say.

I’ve just shown a sampling of images here; you’ll definitely want to check out the thread if you find these interesting.

evdz1_218 by Pauldelbrot

Some of the really dark images are the best in my opinion.  This one is from November 30th, 2012 and marks the 7th month of the safari.  It’s still going on, although, as Pauldelbrot said, the rendering gets slower because of the depth of the zoom.  Another image was posted just this week (Dec 11).

Pauldelbrot has embarked on a number of these zoom excursions with the same journey into the unknown feel to them.  Here’s some highlights from some of the others…

511_28_11_12_2_35_18 by Pauldelbrot

A note from this image, from a series entitled “Fall Woods 1”:

This zoom is near the Autumn Forest zoom. However, the area zoomed into is around a seahorse below and to the right of the green period-3 blob in Autumn Forest I. Out here, the “zero basin” doesn’t exist — there is no zero attractor at all. Where that happens, the basin implodes into a disconnected Julia set, which the surrounding seahorse shapes still try to conform to, with amazingly convoluted results!

Images in this series have mostly been rendered at 32000×24000 and downsampled for a whopping 625 samples per pixel, needed to render the “zero basin Julia” regions properly. I was able, nonetheless, to render most of them in under two hours.

Yeah, that’s 32 –thousand by 24-thousand.  Pauldelbrot is no wimp when it comes to making fractals!

511_03_11_12_12_37_51 by Pauldelbrot

511_02_11_12_12_20_32 by Pauldelbrot

Those above are two of my personal favorites from the Autumn Forest II and I series.  The disorienting vastness of fractal panoramas is easily seen in both as well as Pauldelbrot’s excellent coloring style.  In the process of trying to make fractals into art, I wonder how many of us forget how artistic fractals can be in their raw, freshly calculated form –if only we were to explore them and not the latest layering techniques more.

Lilac Exponent by Pauldelbrot, Sept 14, 2011

This is from more than a year ago.  It caught my eye back then because of the intense patterns of shapes and shapes and more shapes.  This sort of thing is an art form that only fractal algorithms can do and they do it very well, especially at the hands of someone as talented and creative as Pauldelbrot.

As Christian Kleinhuis was saying; Pauldelbrot has really done something new and different even if it does lie within the old category of “classic” fractal art.  I think Pauldelbrot has elevated that classical category higher with this kind of work and his probably represents the best of its kind.

Best of its kind so far, that is.  If Pauldelbrot’s herculean efforts and endless hours of rendering have shown one thing, it’s that there’s still much to be explored even in the realm of classical fractal imagery.  I hope he’s inspired a few others to follow this path, even if it takes them away from the seemingly much more advanced 3D fractals that most work on these days.

There’s a theme that binds all these images together but I can’t seem to find the right words for it.  Freaky; harmonic; other worldly; sacred symbols; journey into mystery: they all fit for some but not for all.  I guess variety is best; with a play on the famous book by Henry James, The Variety of Religious Experience.  There’s a cult-like, mystical weirdness to these –an attractive kind of quicksand.  Perhaps it can’t be described.  Perhaps it shouldn’t — it mustn’t!

~Click on images to view full-size on their original site~

Some old thing by Brutaltoad

Description: I had this old picture lyin’ around an I thougt it would make a great present for the mandelbulb’s birthday <3

happy birthday, Mandelbulb!

That’s from the gallery page on Fractalforums.com.  It never ceases to amaze me how often the folks at Fractalforums.com (FFs) stumble across great looking artwork and then casually move on to some deep technical discussion.    I call this one, Return of the Overlords.  Ancient astronauts; landing pads in the Andes; road to the moon.

This was posted in Nov. 2011 and even then was considered retro by its author.  I think it’s one of the best of the early mandelbulb images.  The mandelbulb wasn’t anywhere as interesting, visually, as the things it gave birth to.  But BrutalToad has managed to nudge it into a higher orbit, primarily, it seems, through color and background texture in addition to the nice scene selection as well.  The shadow is a nice touch.

Sacred Maths by Tabasco Raremaster

This one inspired the theme for the whole posting.  Posted just a few weeks ago on FFs it suggests a mathematical, geometrical religious icon.  You’ll note that the five “snowflakes” are each different and yet a variation of the same theme.

Normally fractals produce similar things since that’s one of the main, expected characteristics of fractals.  Of course, things have gotten much more sophisticated lately and this is a good example.  The different shapes suggests human and not algorithmic creation which again gives it a strange feel for a fractal.

Back in classical times geometry and other mathematical subjects were seen by some as semi-religious topics and became part of the culture of a number of religious cults and societies.  It seems ironic to our modern minds that science would inspire thoughts of the supernatural but the topic does pop up from time to time in online discussions about fractals and so the theme, and the title of this image, needs little explanation.

Chinese Royal Doll by Milan Dobrojevic

The alien-ness of fractal art can be clearly seen in this image.  I’m guessing that it was either made in Steven Ferguson’s Sterlingware or Fractal Explorer using one of his formulas.  I’ve never been able to understand why programs like Sterlingware (Sterling; Sterling-Ware…) are used so little by fractal artists since they produce such creative imagery and do it so easily too.  It’s another one of those fractal art things that requires deeper explanation and contemplation, I guess.

From the phone number on his website, 011art.com, Milan is located in Serbia, part of the former Yugoslavia.  He seems to be very active in a number of fractal related activities and businesses.

It’s a joke now to say that one could stare at an image all day, but for this one by Milan it’s almost true.  Of course, if you have the program you can zoom into it and explore it in great detail which is what people do in art galleries when they move in and look closely at artwork.  One of the things that makes fractals so unusual is this visual playground aspect to them.  It’s almost as if they’re a landscape and the images we see of them are mere snapshots.

Cover Photo 1 by Fractal Art Gallery

I found this one on Facebook, a rather new source of fractal art for me.  This is a brilliant example of how accidentally wonderful 2D fractals can be.  Eyes, hair, fingers; and all that simply from the isolated context all three of these elements find themselves in, in this one selection.

I couldn’t figure out who actually made this image and I had to make up a title for it as well.  Despite the endless self-promotion on Facebook and the flood of junk one has to wade through to find something interesting, I found this and the author is anonymous.

The Paper Caper by Pauldelbrot

According to the gallery page, this is a 2D Mandelbox.  The intriguing details are not so easily seen in this low-res version but it’s good enough to display the contrasting patterns that make this image so… mysterious.

It’s like a big fractal web press printing out little fractals.  Pauldelbrot specializes in these “retro” type images but he gets interesting results because he explores advanced variations of them.  The old style, flat fractals were never a dead end, creatively, they simply require artists with a good grasp of their 2D potential.

Anyhow, Pauldelbrot has flattened the mandelbox.  It’s forwards and backwards at the same time.  Just goes to show there’s always something new and exciting in fractal art if you can think creatively.

The Wall at Sunrise by Tim Emit

Do you think this thing is fascinating?  If you don’t then we clearly don’t share the same tastes in fractal art.  I was stunned when I first saw this on FFs.

To me it’s a stage, and in some strange way that defies logic, there are two lights shining on it.  The patterns and wide variety of them make this one that’s well worth taking a closer look at.

But even in large view the image is great.  Maybe that’s what a great fractal image is: good art at every scale.  The name, “Tim Emit” rings a bell.  Could he be the famous “timemit”?  You can see now why the fractal world needs a phonebook.

It’s a stage that needs no performers because the show is the concert hall itself.  The audience; the orchestra; the curtains; even the backdrop are part of the show.  Should I mention that it didn’t get a single comment on FFs and I was the only one to rate it?  Another mark of greatness in the fractal world.

crystalRock by Tom Lowe

I think I was doing the right thing when I gave Tom Lowe the very first Nobel Prize for Fractal Art; now he’s gone on to create 3D cellular automata.  If you click on the image up there you’ll go to the page that talks about it on his own website for Automata Finder.

Cellular automata are extremely weird as well as being a natural phenomenon.  Seeing one in 3D, or what appears to be 3D is disorienting in a wonderstruck way.

Advantages of this algorithm over standard cellular automata:

• The automata is embedded in a continuous space and continuous time
• It can be simulated at any level of detail, allowing it to be simulated in the distance or up close
• Results are often ‘dynamic fractals’ with the small features changing more quickly than the large features, this matches nature quite frequently

(That’s from Tom’s Automata Finder webpage.)

“Embedded in a continuous space and continuous time”  “Dynamic fractals” — this is the sort of creeping number monster that cellular automata (CA) are, but Tom has jumped the gap and created a the equivalent of a walking Frankenstein.  Although I’m not actually sure about that because I didn’t understand most of what he’s saying on the page.  But that’s what I saw in the video.

subsurface_matrix_decay_by_mandelwerk

Not the sort of thing I’ve ever seen Mandelwerk (Johan Andersson on Deviant Art) make, but this is really a fantastic image for it’s imagery and also the inclusion of wireframe elements.  This is quite ironic when you read the notes from the gallery page:

Just wanted to show you what it looks like when I arrive for a days work at MB3D.

The arrival to a new 3D hybrid fractal world (on a lucky day)

Normally I never submit these kind of first arrival overview renders, but I always do one big to be able to see where the interesting shapes are (if there are any) before I zoom in and get the disposition right. ;)

Clic on the image and check out the full view image, and you might understand how it feels…

A mandelbox in jeans and a t-shirt.  There was a time when jeans and t-shirts weren’t fashionable.  Maybe this will be the next big thing in mandelbox fashions?

Portable Stage Play by FractalJam

Crumbleton Rooftop Terrace by FractalJam

I’ve reviewed an image similar to this by FractalJam in a recent post.  The upper one is the weirdest; they both look like some sort of elegant coffee table but the upper one has what looks to be a snowy forest diorama inside of it.  The lower one is more tropical and suggests a palm tree in the center of the top surface.

They’re very unique mandelboxes as well as very bizarre furniture things.  The coloring in the top one is exceptional.  One doesn’t often find such a combination of intense detail beside areas of no detail.  They complement each other.  I think it’s also a rule of design or something.

Beyond the Familiar, Into the Unknown by dainbramage

The compositioning here emphasizes the central ball node and the koch-like pattern on it.  I think that’s how it works.  The lighting just magnifies that effect.  This type of image is usually dull and monotonous but this one speaks and beams “enlightenment”.  The mark of mystery, the sound of silence; cave of the cosmic tree!  And the tree is covered with trees… the cave itself is a big tree… Where are the leaves?  Our thoughts about the tree are it’s leaves.  How long does summer last around here?

Autumn Leaves by Trafassel

Herr Trafassel, the author of Gestaltlupe and his famous Journey to the Center of the Mandelbox is back again with this very victorian and ornate looking leafy spiral.  Is is a coincidence that it happens to be called “Autumn Leaves” and just happens to follow the previous image of the leafless trees?

On a more serious note, this is actually an image made with the original mandelbulb formula.  It doesn’t normally produce such rich imagery except in Trafassel’s own program, Gestaltlupe.  Or does he have magic powers?

Buddhabrot_moshiahobrot_talis by Alef

This is from a FFs thread discussing Problems with implementing Budhabrot in UF.  There’s a whole bunch of interesting little “rough” images in it.  The Buddhabrot is a very captivating fractal as it often displays this kind of hazy but ordered kind of imagery.  The ghostly appearance and similarity to images of the Buddha have made this fractal an image class of its own.  The golden glow, the obedient sparks; something dharmic this way comes!

Fractal collection by National Post

See any familiar formulas here?  There’s a few that resemble julia sets.  Must be made with UF I’d guess since I don’t know of any other program that gets you that shiny, metallic look so well except for XenoDream or Incendia.  What’s the connection here with the other images in the post?  I’m sure you can see it.  You might need to view the high-res version to be sure.

The Curvaceous Columns of Coldinica by Madman

This one is fresh from the oven, Dec 3rd.  There’s an interesting note on the FFs gallery page:

Description:  Just playing around with MJB’s DE Combinate Technique. Thanks Mark!

That’s MarkJayBee I believe.  Isn’t this the sort of Antarctic city buildings imagined in HP Lovecraft’s novella, At the Mountains of Madness?

At any rate, the shapes and combination concrete/glass/grid construction here is something I’ve never seen even in a 3D fractal.  Clearly, we haven’t reached the end of the varieties of fractal experience.

urbandecay_by_markjaybee

“DEcombinate in Inv Max mode using: Menger3/Transform2IFS/ColumnsIFS/Trans-qIFS/TilingIFS” –from the image notes on the DA page.

If you view the high-res (1,600px × 800px!) you’ll see the variety of forms from that list up there.  But just looking at the low-res you can easily see that this is something that produces categorically different shapes and imagery.  Quite an exciting development; this one is only from Nov. 16.

Desert Fortress by Kali

This is such a beautiful image and yet it may appear to some to just a new rendering of a common fractal pattern.  It’s made with Fragmentarium, a program made by Mikael Hvidtfeldt Christensen and maybe that’s what gives it its special, spectacular look.

Of course, it could have something to do with Kali, too, who is well known for his deeply weird —living— fractal creatures (and a scary worm, too).  Kali is one of those people who is constantly creating interesting artwork as well as extending the capabilities of the medium itself.

I have often found that its not the developers themselves who get the best results from their programs but rather some user who just seems to have an intuitive feel for what the program does best.  It’s probably the same way with musical instruments and power tools, too.

The desert image is a careful balance between the extremes of  mechanical perfection (i.e. monontony) and slick surface rendering (i.e. obliteration of the subject matter).  These two things meet at the place where they compliment each other and the simple fractal pattern is transformed into an extensive landscape of fractal sand sculptures; each slightly unique and yet connecting with the others in similarities of shape.

MB3D_0174_hd by 0Encrypted0

These are not your Dad’s fractals.  Yet another example of how the fractal art tools are evolving.  I had to look carefully to find something in this image which would connect it in any way to the rest of the 3D fractals I’ve seen.  From the comment on the FFs gallery page, “slon_ru” seemed to share the same sense of wonder:

Nice!
Is it mandelbulb3d?!

The sophisticated colouring further disorients me because the “alien swizzle-sticks” appear to be individually coloured although a few seem to betray the standard method.  It received a 5-star rating by five members which is quite something these days on FFs.  Unlike DA, where the comments and feedback grow “like lard on a pig”, the FFs crowd seem to be more absorbed with solving the latest math and graphical rendering riddles than concerning themselves with “who’s watching me?”

pain observer by Jesse

Fractal Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; or Aladin’s cave?  Did I just say that the authors of fractal programs don’t usually make the best stuff with them?  I’m guessing that Jesse used his own program here and what a stylish, non-block-like scene he’s found.  The red and blue, Cecil B. de Mille, Carlsbad Caverns, amusement park lighting is caused by the little lightbulb sources that one can orient and adjust in the program.  Most use them to just add light, but Jesse has used them to paint the walls with glowing color.

Well, there you have it.  Expect bizarre new sights in the 3D fractal world in the coming year;  I’m seeing the addition of a few more gears to the fractal engine.  And maybe a few folks will rediscover the potential of those flat fractals.  Does that sound like crazy New Year’s tabloid predictions?