strange attractors

April 8, 2007 9:54 PM

Chaoscope fractals showcase the beauty of chaos. Flame fractals.
posted by nickyskye (14 comments total)

Ooooooo! Too cool! But I wanna see 'em move.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 9:57 PM on April 8, 2007

I rarely toot my own horn here but I wrote a rendering system that was used to render moving flame-like fractals at cinematic resolutions for both Superman Returns (was used in the opening title implosion sequence) and Stay (was used in the climatic scene on the bridge.) It was a component of "doc" Bailey's fractals rendering system called Spore, which was more famously used on the movie Solaris.
posted by bhouston at 10:05 PM on April 8, 2007 [4 favorites]

what is with this relatively low-res madness? *weeps*
posted by phaedon at 10:08 PM on April 8, 2007

Cool. :) But that damn ElectricSheep isn't downloading stuff for me, Buhanistan... I'm running the Linux version, and it doesn't use BitTorrent for downloading sheep. *le sigh* Others are having this problem, too, so hopefully it'll be resolved soon. It appears some nameservers are down. Or something.
posted by Vamier at 11:23 PM on April 8, 2007

These posts on fractals always take me back to the early 90s running fractint under MS-DOS. It took forever to get even the most rudimentary VGA fractal out of that 486, but it was still fun.

Don't miss the fractal thread from last week, too.
posted by Rhomboid at 1:21 AM on April 9, 2007

These are cool, but sometimes I wonder how much of this beauty is from the graph, and how much is from asthetic color and transparency choices made by the person running the software.

Either way, nice pics!
posted by JHarris at 1:35 AM on April 9, 2007

.. and I've discovered yet another time-sink on Mefi! :-D

Seriously, great stuff; I'll get my laptop to render a few fractals while I multitask elsewhere.
posted by the cydonian at 4:07 AM on April 9, 2007

bhouston, Congrats on your wonderful work! The transparent ones are lovely! I love the way these flame fractals look like transparent, vividly colored wisps of curling smoke.
posted by nickyskye at 8:11 AM on April 9, 2007

nickyskye, thx. Just to be clear, I didn't link to any of the specific fractal renderings produced by the software I wrote, you have to watch the movies for those, but rather I linked to the website of the late "Doc" Bailey, the guy who came up with the flame-fractal techniques we used. His renderings are amazing in terms of colors and shapes, but lacking some of the cinematic features we required, such as quality anti-aliasing, depth of field, motion blur and render speed.
posted by bhouston at 8:32 AM on April 9, 2007

These are all Icons (non-fractal) rendered in Plasma mode with the default colors, there is more to see on Chaoscope gallery. Also, if you want to see them move there are a few animations available on GooTube.

(Disclaimer: I'm the creator of this program.)
posted by surrendering monkey at 9:09 AM on April 9, 2007

NICE NICE. These are beautiful.
posted by willthethrill at 10:18 AM on April 9, 2007

Vamier: I installed Electric Sheep a month ago and it never downloaded anything. I uninstalled it.
posted by kjs3 at 11:03 AM on April 9, 2007

I wish Electric Sheep was one long continuous morph instead of li'l movies, and even more, I wish it were an animated desktop background.

On preview: I just found out that in Ubuntu, which I'm planning to load on my laptop, the latter is possible.
posted by pax digita at 11:20 AM on April 9, 2007

Burhanistan, I came back to find this thread to say that I dl'ed Electric Sheep and it's literally the first time in my life I've actually found a screensaver worth looking at, thanks!

pax digita, I'd personally get bored if it was the same 'scene' for more than half a minute or so… the awesomest part is that it's like 'collaborative art' in the sense that as you vote the specific mutations that are popular gain prominence… very cool stuff.
posted by Firas at 12:11 AM on April 16, 2007