My Journey into Fractals | Hacker News Reader

My Journey into Fractals

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If you want to explore 3d fractals, I really recommend you to test this VR experience:

https://nshelton.github.io/vr/fractals/2017/12/30/RTA.html

hey thanks for posting! dev here if anyone has any questions about this software or fractals in general. Gregory's work here is really impressive, huge fan. Go fractals!

The UI tetrahedrons were all on the floor for me, making it difficult to control. Is this normal?

Looks incredible! Can it run on desktop? Are there instructions to build?

vive only, there is a build for vive on there. You can also get the source, there is a desktop interface but it's still under development and you probably need to know unity to get it to work

I love 3D fractal exploration, especially when it can be realtime.

It's a few years old now, but this is still the best demo I've seen: http://sub.blue/fractal-lab

Thanks for that link, @gunn! Terrific demo, agreed it holds up! Also, tangentially, given so many people are on their phones, it seems other demo sites showcasing desktop-only experiences really ought to follow sub.blue's lead and embed a video. Sort of comparable to sending documents in pdf.

The Mandelbrot set and all its Julia sets are part of a larger, four-dimensional fractal. Explore it here (only JavaScript and WebGL needed):

https://rawgit.com/MatthiasHu/FractalsWebGL/4d/page.html

Shameless self-promotion, but see also http://edyoung.github.io/gnofract4d/

Awesome software!

On the note of self-promotion, here's a simple Mandelbrot explorer to get started with - but this time, it's animated!

Not comparable to anything above, but good to start playing with / coding fractals.

(Web, desktop only.)

http://romankogan.net/math/processing_js/mandelbrot.html

If you liked this, you may be interested in Cyril Crassin's Ph.D. Thesis on Gigavoxels, which can be used to do something very similar.

http://maverick.inria.fr/Members/Cyril.Crassin/

This is mind numbingly beautiful. The fractals with lighting and shadows is some of the best digital art I've ever seen.

I would pay proper money for a game that is basically a 6DOF spaceship game like Descent/Overload but in this fractal realm.

I've thought about this for a while, complete with HOTAS support.

Slightly related to another conversation from yesterday, mentioning Shiffman's Nature of Code: https://natureofcode.com/

really beautiful renders.

I've never seen 3d fractals with moody lighting before.

i would play the hell out of this, even if the whole of gameplay was just bumping around in a ship (with hyper drive).

Don't know if you noticed, but you can download and play a build of this on their Itch.io page: https://bananaft.itch.io/yedomaglobula

Just messing about with it myself and it's unique and fascinating!

I hadn't noticed. Thank you! just in time for the weekend. :P

I love fractals.

A few weeks ago we were at the UMC Nijmegen for a CT scan (father-in-law; liver-cancer; luckily slow-growing and treatable) they had an exhibition of illustrations from Haeckel of microscopic organisms. It struck me at the time just how much those structures reminded me of fractals as well as how beautiful they are.

You can see some pictures here:

https://www.mediamatic.net/en/page/370096/the-haeckel-projec...

And a book:

https://www.amazon.com/Art-Science-Ernst-Haeckel-Multilingua...

Similarly, on visiting the Sagrada Familia one of my first thoughts was that it was like stepping inside a fractal.

Ah, Mediamatic! I did my internship there 20 years ago.

I've spent days playing with Mandelbulb 3D and other fractal programs. I was really into the projection of 4D strange attractors onto a 2D plane or printout (my current screensaver). I would burn weeks in FPS mode navigating these Lovecraftian and Fantastic Voyage [1] worlds.

[1] I refer to the original 1966 movie, since the remakes didn't quite make it my opinion! And Raquel Welch.

Any chance of a download link for your current screensaver, please? :) Sounds interesting.

That's so cool. Reminds me of the work at http://sub.blue/ -- especially look at Fractal Lab: http://sub.blue/fractal-lab

This brings me back to the hours and hours I spent as a kid with VistaPro [1], watching 320px fractal landscapes render, one scanline at a time.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistaPro

Thank you for posting -- I've been super interested in this subject recently after seeing some really great live visuals at a few concerts(1). I'd love to add to my current set of visualizers (2) with something like this.

(1) https://goo.gl/989gYr

(2) http://whoadude.cool

A great write up - very interesting to read about your approaches and the various issues I also came up against with my own Fractal Lab experiment.

> I am bad at both arting and coding.

Wish I was that bad.

Please check out my Fatou.jl julia package, which allows you to share and reproduce 2D fractals with short one-liners written in Julia

https://github.com/chakravala/Fatou.jl

This is so cool! I recently just started tinkering with a fractal expressor that results in voxel world in libgdx to roam around in. But secretly in the back of my mind, I think you are building what I really want! Love it. I’ll be following your project. :)

Beautiful work. I set this: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*y8eAZdMBfXkIB2S8X... as my new desktop background ;)

This video linked from the article is very cool: https://twitter.com/Bananaft/status/894675135260745729/video...

These are absolutely beautiful.

I really like the mood it sets, but I was hoping to see some code for the fractals to be honest :)

Great work!

I feel compelled to plug the book Indra’s Pearls here, by David Mumford et al.

Just stellar. Wow. Whatever game comes out of this, I want to play it!

Great trailer at the end.

Great stuff. Hope you integrate it into your games.

What a delightful journey, thanks for sharing!

I studied fractals for years. But it didn't matter how deeply I looked, they still looked just as complicated as ever.

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