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| Classic Mandelbrot's 2D fractal | Ralf's 3D Fractal | Raster overlay |
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Spot Light Corner: Ralf's Flying Mandel
Here are some explanation notes about the creation of the 3d flying carpet image, as were given by Ralf: "Well, in the past I wrote a ray-tracing program to display fractals in 3d. Nothing special about this so long. But they where all so smooth, and they looked like plastic toys. So I wondered how to add some structure into the flat height data. So I developped a technique which adds a bitmap to the height data: First I draw a gray scale bitmap. The brighter the bitmap is, the more height will be added. Then I loaded the bitmap with my "Fractals!" program (can be downloaded at my home page), which resizes the bitmap to the size of the 2d fractal, and then adds the bitmap to the height data of the fractal. I tested this technique with a bitmap, that contained a gray sinusoidal information and (of course for testing) the appleman. What I saw, looked almost like a flying carpet. So I took the carpet under my chair and put it on the scanner. Voila, here were the fringes. I added them to the image with a drawing program, and now the sky was added with the help of a drawing program too. The fine structure on the surface of the carpet was created with the mosaic filter of the drawing program over the gray bitmap. The gray bitmap now looked like the demo raster above. (It is just a fourth of the actual size!). The original flying carpet was created with a resolution of 4500x3000 pixels, to print a poster." Well, it is that SIMPLE, isn't it? The curator February 2000 |