From the developer’s, Tim Day’s site:

Fracplanet is an interactive tool for creating random fractal planets and terrain areas with oceans, rivers, lakes and icecaps. The results can be exported as models to POV-Ray and to Blender, or as texture maps for more general usage. The code is licensed under the GPL. It uses Qt and OpenGL.

At the Sourceforge project page for Fracplanet, where you can download the program, this note, by Tim Day:

I’ve been using various versions of fracplanet for sometime now, and it’s extremely useful in creating planets. What you can use the program for is quite varied.

“What you can use the program for is quite varied.”  With that begins our x-ray of art.  Zzzz-zap!

But one more software detail.  I tried out Fracplanet with the hope that it might do what Terraform, another little project for drawing landscapes, used to do.  I say “used to do” because it no longer seems to be available as it’s been abandoned and no longer kept up to date with the latest compiling and other technical software things that are beyond my own reach and expertise at present –the versions are old and won’t run on the latest Linux releases.

Terraform could render eerie, x-ray moonscapes with relative ease.  Terragen, the well-known and highly capable landcape renderer, seems in-capable of doing this.  Why?

To put it into technical, graphical terms:  Why is wire-frame rendering not seen as the most important and best artistic use of a fractal terrain generator?

To most readers the answer is painfully obvious.  Who wants to look at wire frame imagery?  The whole purpose of terrain generators is to create realistic looking terrain, not retro graphics.

Which brings us back to the x-ray vision of art: “What you can use the program for is quite varied.”  That’s good because what I want to use the program for is not exactly what the program was designed to do.  Fracplanet, and Terraform (how I miss it!) were designed to do normal things like this:

Fracplanet 0.3.0 with terrain exported to POV-Ray and Blender. (from Tim Day’s site)

Neither Fracplanet or Terraform (RIP) advertise their wire frame features.  That’s because wire frame for most users is nothing more than a degraded version of an image presented for planning purposes.  Nobody intends to actually build landscapes out of wires –especially black and white, monochrome wires.  Like this:

This is art

Art?  In some ways, Fracplanet is better than Terraform because its default image shape is a sphere –a planet.  Sphere’s are circular and the circle is probably the most creative of all shapes by virtue of its great potential for doing all sorts of shape-y things.  Carl Jung, the high priest of 20th century abstract art, said it this way:

“The circle has had enduring psychological significance from the earliest expressions of human consciousness to the most sophisticated forms of 20th-century art.” Aniela Jaffe, ‘Symbolism in the Visual Arts’ Man and His Symbols (Carl Jung)

I guess he’s actually quoting Aniela Jaffe?  Here’s another “super-shape” quote:

“The circle is a symbol of the psyche (even Plato described the psyche as a sphere).” Aniela Jaffe, ‘Symbolism in the Visual Arts’ Man and His Symbols (Carl Jung)

I know it’s all psychology mumbo-jumbo, but it looks great when you mix it with art.  Circles have an extra dimension to them, visually speaking.  Who knows why?

Another question:  Why do fractal terrain developers never quote Carl Jung on their software sites?

Which brings us to this “x-ray” question about fractal art:  What is more important, the fractal or the art?

I mention this because although Fracplanet and Terragen (the Photoshop of terrain generators), use fractal algorithms in their creation of realistic looking landscapes, they aren’t really what I think most people would consider to be “fractal” programs and therefore “fractal art” programs either.

I was quite happy that Tim Day, the author of Fracplanet included “frac” in the title because that made it much more easy for me to pawn off whatever it could make under the label of “frac-tal” art.  Or is all landscape a type of fractal imagery and therefore fractal art of the most fractal-ish kind?

I don’t really care about the answers to questions like that.  Which leads me to ask the question:  Why don’t I care about the answers to questions like that?

It’s because what I’m really interested in is the imagery that fractal algorithms can produce and that includes the imagery that fractal algorithms can help in producing.  “Help” as in creating the initial imagery that can then be transformed and photo-shop-filtered into some sublime thing.  The frankenstein art of post-processing.

In that sense, the label, “fractal art” is as loosely applied to the output of a program like Ultra Fractal, a standard fractal art program, as it is applied to the output of Fracplanet –that is, if the goal is to produce art and not images for a science textbook.  To carry this thought a little further:  One ought to consider how “adulterated” and contaminated fractal art has always been since the very day fractal algorithms were given visible appearance.

There’s always been a touch of mystery in art when one thinks about it and especially when one attempts to explain it.  Call it “subjectivity” as in the phrase, “art is subjective”; but that is only the acknowledgement that art is oriented around the mind and not the tools that make it.  An art form defined by its toolset, its medium, is bound to be limited by “tools”.  That’s tools as in “you stupid tool”.

Great art is not the product of a great medium or of great tools.  Often it’s more of an accident or the result of someone like Roy Lichtenstein who saw something alluring and intriguing in making “paintings” of comic book images –the wire-frames of his times.

“What you can use the program for is quite varied.”  I think all developers are aware that what users will want to do with their programs will always extend beyond what it was they actually designed them to be used for.  And so, people have used Microsoft Excel to draw fractals instead of creating financial reports, and similarly “abused” the text-only capabilities of computer consoles to “draw” Ascii art instead of configuring their operating system.  Or Fracplanet to draw wire-worlds using the parameters in unnatural combinations:

This is more art made in Fracplanet 0.4.0

Fracplanet allows you to set the colors for several landscape features, mostly height-dependent like snow, mountains, hills, lowlands, shore, ocean –highest to lowest; but also rivers.  This allows one to create a two-color “monochrome” image.  It resembles a cheaply printed book illustration.

Yet more art made in Fracplanet 0.4.0

Altering the “Power Law” under the “Basics” tab allows for the generation of much more misshapen freaks of planetary nature such as this one.  That’s what power in the wrong hands will do!  The (so-called) “shore line” becomes the “frame of the ocean” and you can make it a transition color blending the land and sea together.  Note how the “planet” is now taking on the appearance of a microscopic dust particle.  Isn’t that ironic?  Or have I simply reduced a great program to nothing?

Is it better than the Mandelbulb?  That sounds ridiculous doesn’t it?  But really, such comparisons ultimately revolve around what it is that one wants to do with a program.  I’ve noticed that not everyone makes fractal art for the same reasons that I do.  Not everyone is pursuing the same interest.  There are a variety of interests in fractal art, that is, some of us are more interested in oddball imagery than rich, photo-realistic renderings.

How did such a disparate group of people (or am I the only eccentric one?)  end up being grouped together under the same label of “fractal art”?  In the words of the “developer-sage” Tim Day, author of Fracplanet…

“What you can use the program for is quite varied.”

Stop what you’re doing, forget everything you know –and just jump into fractals!

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

alienFlower by love1008

Synthetic.  That’s a good word in computer art.  You like synthetic things if you like computer art.  There’s too much color in this?  It looks unnatural?  It’s synthetic, just like those chewy fruit candies that don’t really taste like real fruit.  They taste better than real fruit.  Space age flavours.  This image has space age colors.  Love it, or the image will delete you.

Based on that watermark in the bottom right corner, I think love1008 would like you to visit his Deviant Art page.  If you’re color blind you won’t see anything.

Now, I know this is going to sound a little weird, but I find the next image to be fractal like even though it’s a four hundred year old painting of Mary Queen of Scots:

Mary_Queen_of_Scots_by_Nicholas_Hilliard_1578

Here’s a fractal made with Sterlingware, the fractalist’s fractal program:

Queen Mary by King Fractal

Don’t see a resemblance?  They’re both made up of curves, lacework, smooth textures, and all arranged in an almost –fractal-like way.  One just happens to have a women’s face in it.  All the rest is pure geometry.  I’ve seen better fractal examples of this sort of lacework, frilly, curving portrait like imagery, but this is the only one I could find easily.

MB3D_0443_hd by 0Encrypted0

Little things, like exponents, negative signs and zeroes have the ability to transform context and context transforms everything else.  Is this a particularly artsy, expressive kind of image?  I don’t think even the artist thought so or he’d have given it a more sublime title.  What I think makes this image so interesting is the thing in the upper left corner and middle that resembles a hillside at night with city lights on it.  Here’s a detail from the full size:

MB3D_0443_hd by 0Encrypted0 (detail)

Then the bright, glow worm, firefly image in the center and the dark, shadowed, silent area to the lower right give the image a strange depth and contrast between brilliant, energetic and moving and the other: subdued, silent and secret.  I was a little confused when I first saw this image because it seemed so vivid and alive and yet appeared to be, on the surface, made up of such ordinary things.

Data136pic10035s by Trafassel

Trafassel is always doing bold and unique things, but here what’s remarkable is the nice simple style of the image.  It’s haunted.  A city of cities built in the dark, or built for the dark.  Here’s the finest part of the full size image:

Data136pic10035s (detail) by Trafassel

As weird and intriguing as a pulp sci-fi cover.  That light edge shading and marble surface texture looks painted and not computer calculated.  A rare glimpse of style in the land of fractals.

The image comes from a posting on Fractalforums that appeared over the recent Christmas holiday season announcing a new type of 3D fractal, tentatively named the Mandelex.  This image above was Trafassel’s experimentation with that new formula.

mandelex 2 by Hiato

Although I think Hiato was probably working in black and white for simplicity’s sake, the stark color scheme is perfect for the type of intense patterning that this formula does.

mandelex 2 by Hiato

Click to view the larger versions so you can get a better view of the rich detail.  Hiato mentions the serpienski pattern at the corners which is another interesting feature.  Unfortunately the thread seems to have gone dead with nothing else posted to it for a month now.  But that may just mean Hiato and the others are tied up with other things for the time being.  I think this could be an interesting development for the future.  It was mentioned in the recent Chaos TV video from Fractalforum.com’s sponsor and owner Christian Kleinhuis.

Navalis_Ignis_Pauldebroti by Alef

Similar to the Mandelex, this one has raw, graphical creativity.  Although it’s just a variation (I think) of the Burning Ship formula, that one was pretty good all on its own too.  Note how the orange area goes from being sky and background in the upper left and then turns into a precisely cut wall or slice in the bottom.  Likewise there are similar “multi-dimensional” effects with the dark areas becoming space and then silhouette.  And then there’s the hazy sun image in the “sky” of the blue figure in the top right area.  It’s an object that defies objectiveness, just like the tricky optical illusions in Salvador Dali’s many surrealist paintings.  Raw fractals sometimes need nothing but a frame and that’s all Alef has done for this one.  That’s a mark of genius in the fractal art world.

FonkyBonkers by lxh

3D fractals could almost be considered a type of synthetic architecture.  Art Nouveau, an architectural style as well as a style of painting and decoration, would be just the category for this image.  This is one of a new type of image that features the curving, non-squarish style of imagery.  I think it’s going to be a whole step up for 3D fractals because the addition of such curving surfaces and designs makes for much more creative and interesting forms.

Speaking of Art Nouveau, here’s something that looks like one of Gaudi’s famous buildings.  All it lacks is a little more curvy-ness  to offset the sharp edges and regular lines, but it makes up for that with that extremely ornate and creative point.

PALACE by abbaszargar

Charles_Rennie_Mackintosh_-_The_Wassail_1900

This of course is a painting, watercolor maybe, in the Art Nouveau style of Charles Mackintosh who apparently was Scottish.  Rather unusual location for the Art Nouveau movement, but like many ideas in art it resonates with artists from all sorts of backgrounds.  I included this because it’s a great example, as is most Art Nouveau, of flowing, geometric imagery.  And so are most types of fractal imagery.

I think fractals are most powerful in impression when they exhibit this sort of symmetry and complex pattern and simple shapes.  That’s all this image really is; the hand painted faces, which fractals can’t produce, add something to the image but could easily have been substituted by simple shapes.

Rise by Tim Emit

What makes this image remarkable and worth turning our attention to?  I don’t know.  But there’s something compelling about that big lump of fractal thing.  It’s like a photo from a fractal biology textbook.  This is something exotic and found growing only in remote places.  Smaller versions have been grown in the laboratory, but they lack the robustness and size of ones like this that grow wild, on the side of a mountain, only lately discovered.

pot4b by RamiGraFx

What is it?  It’s a hand.  See the red box thing in its palm?  It’s a hand showing you this thing it picked up.  It’s been picking them all day and that’s why its fingertips are all covered with red stuff.

wallpaper_hyperbolic_garden by thargor6

I think this was made with Apophysis.  Not your average flame fractal image.  Once again, I present an image with strong geometric characteristics.  That is, except for the interesting woven sticks things in the center and other ball like structures.  I think that’s what caught my eye at first.  This image is a wide screen wallpaper and you really need to see it in its natural size to appreciate the detailed concentric circles.  It looks very Christmassy, but still has enough general appeal to be looked at all year round.  Perhaps it’s an aerial view of a forest and we’re looking down at the round outlines of the trees.  The biggest one in the center being set high up on a hill.  Apophysis can be used for good and not always for evil.

Life as we don’t know it by Kali

Kali’s been on a roll lately.  Coming up with all sorts of graphically intriguing stuff.  I think I mentioned his sea creatures and especially the scary, scary elephant worm in a previous posting.  Recently he’s come up with animated fog for one of the 3D mandelbulb programs that looks like it was made in the computer lab of a major movie studio.  And there’s the exploding mandelboxes, too.  I can’t show any of them here because they’re flash applets.  Step right this way folks, to see the floating brain and also the amazing liquid planet (scroll down to it).

This image incorporates, I suspect, some of the volumetric fog rendering techniques he’s been experimenting with.  Depicting depth is technical challenge in all computer rendering because the appearance of depth, if you think about it, is the result of many complex things, such as air, which have to be deliberately programmed into the imagery.  Perhaps it’s harder to generate the impression of depth than it is to program the fractals themselves.

The fog is used to create the appearance of distance as more distant objects are deeper into the fog than closer ones. It also produces a rather nice effect in general making the image look more painterly than the average mandelbox.  But it also has nice coloring and a fine use of lighting.  Lighting is something that is a parameter –adjustable element– in 3D fractals and it can be used for better or for worse.  This is an example of the better use of it, in fact, it’s an excellent example.  Not only that,  there’s a nice space at the top right for the title of the 2014 Fractalforums.com Calendar to go.  It’s a natural choice for the cover and exemplifies the latest rendering techniques as well as the exotic sights that fractals can produce.  Furthermore, this one has real commercial appeal to it being so well composed and finely rendered.

Rainbow Armada by isight

Heavy duty 3D programming here.  If you click on the image you’ll discover how easily it was to make: just a camera click.  I’ve always felt that there’s more to fractal art that pertains purely to the eyes and mind than there is that pertains to the programming and math.  From such a perspective, such a radical, precarious perch, comes the intuitive notion that other things are close to fractal art even though they are not anywhere near fractal math or programming.  Here we start from the premise that the medium of fractal art is pixels –imagery– and not parameters.

Is that crazy?  I think I hit my head.  That can happen when you just blindly jump into fractals.

Dave Makin, in a thread over at Fractalforums.com suggested that the mandelbulb deserves more attention:

From Fractalforums.com, click to go to the thread

Anyhow, while still shaking my head and wondering (like taurus66 in the quote) why anyone would be interested in that puffy, spiny thing called the mandelbulb,  along came someone else, in a completely different thread, posting their marathon session, 6-core rendering of “that puffy, spiny thing:”

From Fractalforums.com, click to go to thread

So I’m a sucker for anything that looks like it might be something new in the fractal world, and also a little bit curious to see what on Earth could be worth spending “10 days on 6 cores” to render…

Mandel Donut Vegas by Furan, click to view the 35mb version

The full-size is …big!  A screenshot says it better.  I had to shrink it somewhat to fit it into a blog posting:

Big is a relative thing, but this is biggy-big to me.

Print size is saying it’s nine feet wide… although at only 72 ppi…

But my browser doesn’t seem to do scaling very nicely so I looked it over at full resolution and I slowly realized that maybe that spiny, puffy mandelbulb really is worthy of more experimentation and general attention from fractal artists.

Even the title is hums with excitement: Mandel Donut Vegas.  Las Vegas, I’m sure he means, and the Mandel Donut bit is something that has a literary term for it where one contrasts two words with each other; the scientific Mandel and the truck stop Donut.  They get married in Vegas?

“Electrified Pumpkin” would not be as good.  I guess “Vegas” says electric better.  The top rings almost look like LED lights in a clear plastic tube.  And that’s the sort of schlocky, kitschy atmosphere of Vegas all over again.

At full size I was impressed by how much detail and variety there is in this “mere mandelbulb”.  It glows and the light fills, overfills and spills out in a hundred different ways.  This thing is more like a giant Disney World attraction than a simple 3D fractal image.  It must be the high resolution that makes such an impression possible.

Which brings me to another thing, that being the observation that while most fractal images look better as thumbnails (sad, but true) because they lack interesting detail when viewed large, a few, like Mandel Donut Vegas, can handle the close-up inspection and high resolution heavy lifting of a truly intriguing art object.  In fact, this thing looked better and better at high resolution.

Let me give an example:

Mandel Donut Vegas by Furan (detail)

Power, excitement; is it a roller coaster or blazing theatrical event?  Electric cables or ancient Egyptian mummy bandages?

A technical note.  You ought to be wondering what program this was made with.  Doctor Furan explains:

I’m rendering in my own Fortran 77 program (I’m working on implementation of material models to FE-systems. Now only in F77, so it’s a sort of an excercise.)

Mandel Donut Vegas by Furan (detail)

Allusions to the ruins of the Colosseum of ancient Rome?  I particularly like how the colors sometimes become too intense and overwhelm the image.  Lava flowing?  It’s all there –and more.  What are words compared to these sights?

Mandel Donut Vegas by Furan (detail)

Line and over-line.  Light and shadow; hot and cold; the burning and the burned.  Yes, that old puffball called the mandelbulb has a few thrills left in it.

Not to be confused with these things:

The original, original Mandelbulb

And now, back to lurking at Fractalforums.

Almost forgot: Furan has a website with more images: http://furan.sweb.cz/