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Let me put it another way: If you google "fractal art", you 'll find that 95% of the hits show spirally thingies. Some of them are quite beautiful and have probably taken hours to render, but you know that with a little work, you can make something close to it yourself or at least something with the same "feel".
So let me rephrase my question: Do you think that there will be a time when every new picture will look like one that has been rendered previously or at least has the same "feel" as something rendered previously? Something that you will immediately recognise as, say, a scale -1.34 Mandelbox, rotated x,y and z degrees, scaled and then sphere folded? Something that can no longer surprise you?
> Do you think that there will be a time when every new picture will look like one that has been rendered previously or at least has the same "feel" as something rendered previously?
Yes, absolutely, this is *bound* to happen *assuming* you remove the term "every new picture" and replace it with "the majority of new pictures" - already image searching for "Mandelbulb" or even "Mandelbox" is basically like searching for "dog" on say a stock photography site and of course that goes quadruple at least for "Mandelbrot" or "Julia" or "Fractal"
This is also true historically of traditional forms of art displayed in "real" galleries - it's just that the "internet effect" rapidly speeds up the process *and* increases the amount of dross required to be sifted through to find the good stuff especially when doing general searches either of the entire web or very large free gallery sites such as DA or R'osity.
> Something that you will immediately recognise as, say, a scale -1.34 Mandelbox, rotated x,y and z degrees, scaled and then sphere folded?
There are many, many images of 2D fractals that experienced fractallers will recognize as being say the standard Mandelbrot in elephant valley or some such *but* even then the *good ones* are likely to be such that reproducing a similar final result is very difficult simply because of the likelihood that the image is multi-layered with very particular combinations of colouring methods, palettes and merging and trying to reproduce something close would take as long or longer than the original did *even for the artist who created it* without actually starting from the parameters of the original !
With 3D the rendering and in particular the colouring methods are not yet as sophisticated as those for 2D and in fact I expect the colouring algorithms used are likely to be less significant in this genre than in 2D fractals, probably being replaced with ever more sophisticated base formulas, better lighting including virtually unlimited numbers of light sources etc, using algorithms that allow more and more different fractals in the same scene (either in just one layer or using multi-layering) and probably many more possibilities that are applicable in 3D ray-tracing rather than simple 2D.
So the answer is yes, more and more "recogniseable' images will appear, but just like in 2D the ones that stand out from the crowd will not be easy to reproduce.
> Something that can no longer surprise you?
That's a bit like asking the biologists the same question about life on earth - and the answer of course is provided by recent history in that case, I mean no-one expected the arsenic scenario !
There will always be images produced using *any* kind of fractal that will surprise even the most knowledgeable fractal artst and/or mathematician.
So far the biggest surprise that I discovered personally was the 'Magic Formula" (in mmf4.ufm if I remember correctly), for which certain parameters produce a Mandelbrot that is essentially similar to z^2+c except that there are disconnected (tiny) areas of inside in each iteration band - for the power 2 version the number of these increases by a factor of two in each iteration band - now I admit that's a surprise from a mathematical point of view really, but renders of this done artistically are obviously at least somewhat different from the visual point of view as well. (Note that experimentally it seems each of these tiny areas has a minibrot at its centre but I have no matehmatical proof for this).
Also from both a mathematical and aesthetic standpoint both the Mandelbox and Mandelbulb were surprises - in fact they are better described as shocks or even revolutions so again I expect such things to happen in the future - in fact I expect the rate that such occurrences happen to increase exponentially.
As far as finding decent fractal art on the internet is concerned, take for example the deviantArt galleries, if you just want to find "quality" then the best solution is to start with (or find) one member there whose art you like (or whose opinions you respect) and check out their favourites - and then check out the favourites of their favourites etc. This is massively more efficient than using general searches in that it's far more attuned to your personal taste and fairer in terms of priorities with respect to how long the art's been on the site etc.
I think the same idea basically applies to browsing around R'osity too.
Of course if you don't have much time to devote to this then at deviantArt just look through the Daily Deviations for the fractal art that has been given that privelege, this is still better than using the general searching on DA (and gives good starting point/s for searching using member's favourites).
June 21, 2016, 11:27:30 PM
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