Yeah I just wanted to share this after putting way too much work into it:
So, that was today's project, it took most of the evening to do.
The top image is the main fractal unaltered. It is a merging of 3 formulas... most fractals I make involve more than one... and a ton of tweaking and experimenting to get it to do that. It also involved a lot of material editing... not something I do all that often. The 3D fractals can be rendered in ways that mimic different materials and textures, such as metallic and reflective, or glossy and shiny, or even translucent. Material editing is just as complicated as dealing with the formulas.
This one was a hard render due to the combination of a somewhat reflective material, an extremely complex shape, lots of lights positioned around it, and full raytracing.
Part of what makes the whole process funky is that these things arent rendered like, say, something in Blender would be. Most 3D things you see are made of polygons and whatnot. But there's none of that here... no polygons in sight. I always say these things are just "made of math". It makes for a lot of odd challenges in dealing with them. For instance, if you're working in Blender and you zoom in on an object, you'll get closer and closer and if you keep going, you'll sort of clip into it when the camera runs into it. It remains solid the whole time though.
But with a fractal, it gets weird. Sometimes as you get close the thing will appear to almost crumble... this happens at a particular distance from the camera, and typically means there's something funky going on with the formulas involved, or settings of the camera or render system. Often, no matter how close you get, there's always more to zoom in on. These things are endless and recursive. If you've ever seen a Mandelbrot zoom, it's like that, but in 3D and incredibly resource intensive. Some fractals are good for this, others just get weird and unwieldy when you try it. This thing is one of the ones that just goes weird, so it's best to do an outside render.
Took forever, it did. But the final render also took forever. A freaking hour! Fractals are strange things, and just dont render in the same way as polygonal objects do. The final render is usually awkward. The 2D ones are as well, but they're usually much faster (but not always).
The images after the first one are altered versions of it. #2 involved a second render with a chromatic aberration effect applied (wont do THAT again). The others were alterations created through Photoshop, Pixage, and One Lab (which is done with my phone, it's extremely versatile and also very expensive... it's my most used phone app). And that last one is a whole separate fractal, which I used for the background. That one was made in a whole different program. I have about 11 or so programs I use to create these things, they're all good at different things.
That's a lot to do with just one starting image but after all that time making it... yeah, gonna get as much out of it as I can.
And that's enough digital art for awhile. Ugh.
So, that was today's project, it took most of the evening to do.
The top image is the main fractal unaltered. It is a merging of 3 formulas... most fractals I make involve more than one... and a ton of tweaking and experimenting to get it to do that. It also involved a lot of material editing... not something I do all that often. The 3D fractals can be rendered in ways that mimic different materials and textures, such as metallic and reflective, or glossy and shiny, or even translucent. Material editing is just as complicated as dealing with the formulas.
This one was a hard render due to the combination of a somewhat reflective material, an extremely complex shape, lots of lights positioned around it, and full raytracing.
Part of what makes the whole process funky is that these things arent rendered like, say, something in Blender would be. Most 3D things you see are made of polygons and whatnot. But there's none of that here... no polygons in sight. I always say these things are just "made of math". It makes for a lot of odd challenges in dealing with them. For instance, if you're working in Blender and you zoom in on an object, you'll get closer and closer and if you keep going, you'll sort of clip into it when the camera runs into it. It remains solid the whole time though.
But with a fractal, it gets weird. Sometimes as you get close the thing will appear to almost crumble... this happens at a particular distance from the camera, and typically means there's something funky going on with the formulas involved, or settings of the camera or render system. Often, no matter how close you get, there's always more to zoom in on. These things are endless and recursive. If you've ever seen a Mandelbrot zoom, it's like that, but in 3D and incredibly resource intensive. Some fractals are good for this, others just get weird and unwieldy when you try it. This thing is one of the ones that just goes weird, so it's best to do an outside render.
Took forever, it did. But the final render also took forever. A freaking hour! Fractals are strange things, and just dont render in the same way as polygonal objects do. The final render is usually awkward. The 2D ones are as well, but they're usually much faster (but not always).
The images after the first one are altered versions of it. #2 involved a second render with a chromatic aberration effect applied (wont do THAT again). The others were alterations created through Photoshop, Pixage, and One Lab (which is done with my phone, it's extremely versatile and also very expensive... it's my most used phone app). And that last one is a whole separate fractal, which I used for the background. That one was made in a whole different program. I have about 11 or so programs I use to create these things, they're all good at different things.
That's a lot to do with just one starting image but after all that time making it... yeah, gonna get as much out of it as I can.
And that's enough digital art for awhile. Ugh.
, but I'm seeing gigantic aggressive wheat stalks here. I'm amazed you can get that from math/fractals! I love the one you called OrbWorm -- really gorgeous woven look to it. And I love the one with the reflective water-like lower part. The lake-effect kind of tames the energy. And the last one is beautiful, very gentle colours and fades and glow to it, and something about the almost-symmetry is really appealing.
