Polar Perspective 4

I really like the kinda tunnelish effects going on with this one.

It's dead simple too, three rules in the definition:

val polar4 = RuleBasedFractal("polar4",
  weight(2).color(ORANGE).colorWeight(0.3).rotate(72).invertRadius.scale(4),
  weight(3) color CREAM colorWeight 0.3 rotate 10 translate(5, 0) scale 0.9,
  weight(1).color(PURPLE).colorWeight(0.3).polar.scale(-2).translate(0, -1)
)

Purple Brains and software updates

I should point out that the software I made to make these pictures is has been posted to GitHub. Feel free to fork it. I'd be interested in seeing what other people can do with it and will happily merge in good pull requests.

http://github.com/benhardy/fractus

It's been a couple of years since I last posted an image, but I've been making occasional updates to the software since porting to Scala, and refactoring it in a more idiomatic functional style. There's still quite a bit of work to do there, but it's getting there.

In particular, the Brush classes' imperative loops are now gone. They are now not only much easier to understand but also bug free - there was a paint bleeding bug which disappeared after converting to a functional style. It's now much easier to reason about their correctness and to unit test them. I'm not sure as I haven't benchmarked it yet, but it seems to run faster too.

Anyway here's another sample, called Purple Brain. It's in the code. Enjoy.

Alien Lotus Root

A variation of Alien Blue Cheese.

Changes.

I ported my image generation software to Scala in order to take advantage of the expressiveness of the language. It works really well and this is making it really easy to make interesting changes. For instance, I implemented Adaptive Filtering for Progressive Monte Carlo Image Rendering rather easily, which helps smooth noise in dark areas, resulting in image improvements like this:



As you can see by comparing this image to the previous one, the noise in the dark areas is pretty much diminished. Electric Sheep uses the same technique, of course, as does the flam3 library. One thing I'd like to figure out is if I can get flam3 to generate this particular fractal, which isn't all that complicated but just involves 2 rules which happen to combine affine transformations in cartesian and polar space.

Alien Blue Cheese

(1920x1200, 3.1MB)

And membranes for all!

Twelve Ways

I'm currently using this one as a desktop wallpaper. Makes me think of Leonardo da Vinci for some reason, but would need a human in there somewhere. Anyway, I think it makes a good wallpaper because it's subdued and pretty mellow colored, and blends in well with the Ubuntu color scheme.



Rendered a couple of versions here for your desktop. Click on them to get to big versions, then right click on them and you'll probably get an option to use as wallpaper or save. Do what works for you. They're big files - they're saved as PNGs to preserve image quality. The JPEG color compression stuff does horrible things to these images.

1024x768: (PNG, 1.3 megs)


1920x1200: (PNG, 3 megs)

looks darker here when small than it really is.

2560x1920: (PNG, 7 megs)

Elementals 1

(800x800)

Representing the classical 4 elements along with aether, just for kicks.

1600x1200 (3.7MB PNG):