Cosmic Checkers - a fractal with detailed making process
Back to the glorious fractals!
I can't do anything else on my spare time these days. There are so many combinations to experiment with, and after I read some theory on how variables are passed from formula to formula in a chain, how iterations work, and how the final image is rendered, I am starting to get a better grasp of JWildFire. Now, I can design the things I want more efficiently. So I started with a random choice of transformations and tweaked them until I got something nice to work on.
And a quick render of that:
That was a nice starting point, but looked too chaotic and, to be honest, those swirls are overused in fractal images sooooo much! So, I added some more transformations, trying to move the swirls to the background and get the focus on some other pattern. The white ring was a nice touch, so I used certain variations to blur the swirls away, making the patterns more smooth, and gave more weight to the white ring, until I got this:
Great... a nice cosmic & nebula theme... AGAIN! The color palette was nice though, with those patches of purple making a nice contrast to the whites, so kept it. Now I needed something to break the nebula-theme and impress the viewer. I tried the more dynamic transformations, those that totally mess the input-pixels and give a wrapped output. The rosoni transformation did the trick, and gave a great output, in my opinion.
(rosoni source code, warning: CONTAINS MATHS!):
I could have stopped here, as I liked the picture a lot, but I had to use the new technique I've learnt: LAYERS! You can use two or more layers to combine two or more full fractals, without having the transformation of one layer mess with the others. It is like overlaying two or more transparencies together and seeing the combined result. So, I wanted to put something the center, like a destination appearing in the end of that checkerboard "tunnel", like something coming out of hyperspace, or whatever sci-fi mumbo-jumbo works for you. You can see that second layer as an inset labeled "2" in this process screenshot:
And here is a render of only that 2nd layer, very simple:
When the two layers are combined, the final render in 2400x1800 looks like this last picture here. I hope you'll like it as much as I enjoyed creating it.
You have to see this in full-size, right-click on image and select "Open image in new tab".
This reminds me so much of the visual representations of chaos theory in Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park.
You are right! In chaos theory, even the smallest changes in a system can affect the big picture and have unpredictable results. This is also true for fractals: a change in the 3rd decimal of a variable, after thousands of iterations, can give totally different results than the previous one. In fact, this is very obvious in JWildFire and maybe I'll comment on that with examples in a future post.
also dude holy shit congrats on a post that made it to over $70! You're steemit famous now!!
good scale and perspective in you work, greetings, invited you to my profile and see my photographic work :D
Thanks, i'll take a look at your blog too.
I wish I had the time to learn this - but the little spare time I have I need to use in my studio, painting the 'old fashioned way' - unplugged, lol
I did however play in Photoshop, working with details of my Decalcomania paintings, such as this one Topology of Decalcomania which makes me wonder about taking it a level further with fractals.
But you've tackled a bit with digital manipulation in the past, and the results were fascinating -- I distinctly remember you Fomori posts. The good thing with fractals is that you don't have to understand all the back-end (the formulas, maths, etc) you can just experiment with various settings and see where it goes. On the other hand, I totally understand if you don't like that, because I also want to have a high degree of control on what I do, not just randomly turn dials & control. I suggest you to give it a try anyway, and see how it goes.
Love the interplay between the tones. Really cool patterns in this fractal.. ^
Thank you, check the hi-res to see the details. I just realized though, that it is not in the size I uploaded (2400x1800), probably steemit resizes very big images before saving them in the blockchain.
This all sounds way too complicated for my brain to understand but the results are very beautiful and fascinating. Learn something new every day. Thank you.
Do not bother with the process if it sounds too technical. The good thing with the modern applications is that you can ignore all the technicalities and just turn the dials and controls until you come up with a beautiful image; that allows even a casual user to create something beautiful.
When I explored the fractal realms for the first time, some 20 years ago, the apps were much harder to use, you had to input the actual numbers in the variables & mathematical formulas to see any results. And it took hours to render a high-quality image. So, things have improved a lot!
Thanks for explaining 😊
@nyarlathotep yeah! Why I have never considered that until eventually now. Tend to be the animals immortal in advance of male fully commited sin???.
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STOPGorgeous!
Fractals sure have come a long way since I used to plug in random numbers! I got pics like your second.
Layering takes it totally over the top! 👍