Your post does make me wonder about the issues faced in deliberately creating symmetrical or asymmetrical designs with fractal images. Yet I still have my own graphics challenges on occasion with Photoshop, while I've been using it since 1997.
Oh yeah, symmetry can be very odd within fractals.
In an overall sense, most fractals are stuffed with symmetry and recursion. But sometimes that symmetry can be hard to find, or hard to just deal with from the idea of a final image.
Like, there's this that I did awhile back:
Doesnt look very symmetrical. And it can be extra confusing if looked at from another angle. The bit in the image there looks huge and complex, but it's only a tiny sliver of the actual structure, which looks like this:
It's much, much bigger than it might look. The location that the final image was taken from was deep within one of those protruding slabs on the bottom of the thing.
There's symmetry everywhere in there. But it can be hard to get at. There's this:
Lots of obvious symmetry here, but good luck finding this spot. It's inside of the same structure... somewhere. The problem with this image wasnt really finding that spot though... searching for things is part of working with fractals. Rather, it's trying to get the camera to be in the right spot to produce a good image. There was no way the actual image itself was going to be properly centered. It just wasnt happening.
This is what the navigating process looks like on my end with the 3D ones:
I covered a menger sponge in needles, that's what that object is. I'm not sure why I did this, but it's the next object I'm going to work with.
And you can probably see that it's a tad challenging to roam through. The sheer amount of complexity in the thing. And then lots of zooming, and whaddya know, the needles are covered in needles, because of course they are.
I move slowly because the app itself gets a bit crashy if I rush too much, but the thing just about kills itself every time I stop to let it render a bit. This is a dumbed down version of the object, too. The navigator sorta simplifies everything for easier navigation. The real object is more complicated, and a final render of that thing will be hideously long. The deeper in I am, the slower everything goes.
All the smaller tweaks and such that go into the later parts of this just get even slower. Imagine trying to animate that thing, ugh. Most of the 3D things I make arent as complicated as this one, but still.
The 2D ones are not nearly as slow to work with, but they're still not exactly snappy.
That thing that happens in the 3D one whenever I move, where it sorta pixelates and then pulls itself together, the 2D one I used to make the orb thing does the same thing (just much, much faster). So that slows it all down. With normal art apps you dont have to wait and watch it cough every time you plop a bit of digital paint down, but it's a part of the fun with all of these.
All of this together, and.... yeah trying to get just the right symmetry in any of the final results can test my patience just a tad. Eventually I have to be like "oh heck with it, that'll have to do" and just be done with it. I'm a bit of a perfectionist so this part always bugs me.
The other rough part though is that there's no good way to learn these things. Something like Photoshop, there's a million tutorials out there, and there's tons of documentation. For what I'm doing, there's a badly formatted PDF manual (which is a couple of years old and was never updated with later features), and like, a few bad tutorials on Youtube that are like 9 years old, which is an issue since the most recent release of this app was like 5 months ago. I've mostly been stuck on my own with all of these things. Some are harder to work with than others.
On a side note, after doing that video there, I am sorta wondering about the whole "I dont need to upgrade yet" thing.
That 5090 or whatever it is that
@grommet had talked about elsewhere suddenly looks darned appealing after trying to swim through that mess in the video.
. Looking at your works - just “Wow!”
