OK, We've all seen it.

The ever familiar grid that IS Open GL.

We make our images and rotate them, change the angle of viewing, and make our spline and smoothing adjustments and what ever other parameters our program of choice offers.

But what about Open GL's Seedy Underbelly?

Am I the only one who enjoys turning these things over and seeing what lies beneath?

Here's a good example -

I made this 2D render in Mutatorkammer:



It looked like this in Open GL (rotated):



But... If one rotates the grid a full 180 degrees around the z axis, you can see the Bottom of the fractal!




I have gotten some very nice results and interesting comparisons by doing this.  Here is another pair of "Top and Bottom" views:





I mirrored the bottom image of the above pair (the only image editing in these images!) to demonstrate the symmetry (looking at the bottom of these naturally produces mirror images of the other side).


And some more -








One last comparison, just because it's so weird...


A 3D Terrain type fractal




And the underside:

I've played around with looking at the underside of my 3D plots in FractalWorks before, but have never been satisfied with the lighting because the normals are set up for top-side viewing.

Today I decided to add a "flip plot" option, and I'm pretty pleased with the results.

Here's a sample image:


You could actually argue that this plot is right side up, since it uses distance estimate values for the height, and distance estimates are smallest near the Mandelbrot set. My program normally inverts the values so Mandelbrot points are at the peak and points far from the set are at the bottom.