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The fascinating, otherworldly fractal art of Julius Horsthuis

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Nydex

Nydex

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I've long been fascinated with fractals, ever since I was fully immersed into a maddening world of them during a heroic dose LSD journey I had a few years ago. I've seen a lot of fractal art flowing about, but there's one specific artist that, for me personally, stands head and shoulders above all others in terms of lushness, vibrancy, and mastery of this obscure corner of the art world - Julius Horsthuis.

Beyond being absolute eye candy, fractal art is something more - a visual manifestation of an elegant and indescribably beautiful mathematical concept named after the first man to visualize it graphically - Benoit Mandelbrot:
Zn+1 = Zn2 ₊ C
Click to expand...
In that equation, known as the Mandelbrot equation, C and Z are complex numbers and n is zero or a positive integer (natural number). Starting with Z₀=0, c is in the Mandelbrot set if the absolute value of Zn never becomes larger than a certain number (that number depends on c, no matter how large n gets.

This equation can also be modified in many ways, producing other fractal arrangements, like the "Nova" fractal, or the "Magnet" fractal, but in its essence lays a simple truth - provided you have unlimited resources, you can scale this equation infinitely and achieve a fractal geometry that defies understanding.

So here comes Julius, fascinated by this elegant equation and the infinite characteristic of its output, and he pumps thousands upon thousands of dollars in hardware, boots up Mandelbulber3D and Adobe AfterEffects, and the result is breathtaking:
[YOUTUBE]

[YOUTUBE]

[YOUTUBE]

He also has a captivating piece of work for VR called Recombination, but I don't have a VR headset. I can't imagine what kind of a transformative experience it would be to be peaking on LSD and watching something like this in VR.

It's just something I thought the art heads among you would appreciate!

Love, Light & Fractals :love:
 
Very nice!

I too am a long time fractal head ... For real time, decently deep, Mandelbrot zooming, try "retina mandelbrot", available for windows and ios for free. It's remarkable how things have progressed since the days of waiting minutes for images to compute :)


cheers,
frac4
 
fractals4life said:
Very nice!

I too am a long time fractal head ... For real time, decently deep, Mandelbrot zooming, try "retina mandelbrot", available for windows and ios for free. It's remarkable how things have progressed since the days of waiting minutes for images to compute :)


cheers,
frac4
Click to expand...

Indeed they have, but the app you've shared is for simply zooming into a 2D Mandelbrot set. The 3D stuff is where solid hardware is really needed. I tried generating some stuff with my i5-13600K and RTX3080 and it was taking a LONG time to output some more complex 3D model in video form. I talked to Julius personally and asked him what kind of hardware he uses, he advised that anything below AMD's Threadripper CPUs will take far too long to render this kind of animations to be feasible. If I remember correctly, he's currently using a Threadripper PRO 7985WX, which costs about $10,000. Not cheap.
 
Oh yeah, one thing I like with fractals is you can *always* reduce your spanky new machine to a crawl with comparatively little effort. Gives you a sense of perspective :)

Though with cloud stuff these days, you can hire a month of a zillion cores for not *too* much if you find a movie worthy scene. Back in the day I got hired to make a 2D zoom with fractint, it was a 12 hour overnight job on a 386DX25 for about five seconds play time SD video!
 
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