The New York Times brings us the sad news that Benoit Mandelbrot, famous mathematician and creator of the ‘fractal’, passes away Thursday after a bout with pancreantic cancer.
Dr. Mandelbrot traced his work on fractals to a question he first encountered as a young researcher: how long is the coast of Britain? The answer, he was surprised to discover, depends on how closely one looks. On a map an island may appear smooth, but zooming in will reveal jagged edges that add up to a longer coast. Zooming in further will reveal even more coastline.
“Here is a question, a staple of grade-school geometry that, if you think about it, is impossible,” Dr. Mandelbrot told The New York Times earlier this year in an interview. “The length of the coastline, in a sense, is infinite.”
I’m sure everyone in computer graphics has played with a Mandelbrot fractal generator. RIP.
An interesting product from NeuroSystems called ‘Substance’ aims to make fractal-modeling of organic forms and structures easy, with amazing realism in thefinal renderings. Using multi-threading, image-based lighting, and fast rendering modes, the pictures it comes up with are jaw-dropping.
Powered by NeuroSystems’ procedural organic modeling technology P.O.M.E and advanced rendering technology P.U.R.E, SUBSTANCE exploits the process of evolution to create an artwork which continually changes according to a genetic evolutionary algorithm. Basically, the artist is able to control the development of a piece of work through some form of “selection”, in a manner analogous to natural selection. In a system such as SUBSTANCE, one or more parent virtual sculptures are mutated and/or crossbred to produce a number of “children”, which are then selected again. These results are then used to produce the next “generation”.
Evolutionary systems such as SUBSTANCE allow the artist to generate complex unique unpredictable computer graphics artworks in a very visual way.
Get the viewer for free, but buy the full product for only $49.
Going to start off the morning with some mind-bending visuals care of hömpörgő and the previously discussed Mandelbulb software. The music is frankly annoying, so you might want to turn off the audio, but the fractal architecture will blow your mind.
StarScene’s procedural terrain and texture generator ‘Fractscape’ has just hit version 1.5, with an impressive collection of features:
A variety of controls for roughness, size, height, etc.
Load in or draw heightmaps to control the basic shape of the terrain
Adjustable auto-texturing based on height and slope
Terrain resolution up to 4097×4097, texturemap resolution up to 2048×2048
Virtually unlimited undo/redo of almost everything, so you can always go back to that cool landscape you just had
Load/save even the largest terrains as small Fractscape files — everything is procedurally generated
Export them as 8 or 16 bit heightmaps, or as .obj meshes (triangles or quads)
Export texturemap as 4-channel .tiff splatmap, or as a solid-shaded .png
Explore terrains from a first-person view for an up-close look
The software is built using Unity, and therefore the resulting terrains work great with it. The software is available free, but a $20 registration is required to unlock file export.
Geekdad points us to a free GPL Windows-Only app called Apophysis for generating Fractals.
I just came across a free, open-source program called Apophysis, which allows even people who don’t really understand how fractals are generated build them easily. It only runs on Windows, unfortunately, but it comes with a lot of examples and seems to be remarkably versatile. The latest release allows the creation of 3D fractals as well, though I haven’t yet tried that feature. The program isn’t aimed at kids, but should be easy enough for most kids who can read on their own or with minimal assistance
The software alone is neat enough, but it’s also popular amongst artists on DeviantArt for the 3D Fractal capabilities. You can find a great collection of Fractal Images in this list of 40 at WebDesignerDepot.
Shame that it’s Windows only. It’s written in Delphi (a Visual-Basic type system build on Pascal by Borland), so porting it to other platforms will be difficult.
Everyone knows the famous 2D Mandlebrot fractal, but it’s 3D equivalent has been difficult to find. Daniel White has been working on it for the last few years with help from several mathematicians and has finally stumbled onto a formula that looks like it could be the elusive 3D Mandlebrot, the Mandelbulb.
Our story starts with a guy named Rudy Rucker an American mathematician computer scientist and science fiction author and in fact one of the founders of the cyberpunk science-fiction movement . Around 20 years ago along with other approaches he first imagined the concept behind the potential 3D Mandelbulb barring a small mistake in the formula which nevertheless still can produce very interesting results – see later and also wrote a short story about the 3D Mandelbrot in 1987 entitled “As Above So Below” also see his blog entry and notebook . Back then of course the hardware was barely up to the task of rendering the 2D Mandelbrot let alone the 3D version – which would require billions of calculations to see the results making research in the area a painstaking process to say the least.
Hit his site for several more pictures and details.
The New York Times brings us the sad news that Benoit Mandelbrot, famous mathematician and creator of the ‘fractal’, passes away Thursday after a bout with pancreantic cancer.
An interesting product from NeuroSystems called ‘Substance’ aims to make fractal-modeling of organic forms and structures easy, with amazing realism in thefinal renderings. Using multi-threading, image-based lighting, and fast rendering modes, the pictures it comes up with are jaw-dropping.
StarScene’s procedural terrain and texture generator ‘Fractscape’ has just hit version 1.5, with an impressive collection of features:
Geekdad points us to a free GPL Windows-Only app called Apophysis for generating Fractals.
Everyone knows the famous 2D Mandlebrot fractal, but it’s 3D equivalent has been difficult to find. Daniel White has been working on it for the last few years with help from several mathematicians and has finally stumbled onto a formula that looks like it could be the elusive 3D Mandlebrot, the Mandelbulb.
VizWorld.com 
Comments