Welcome to Fractal Forums

I still remember when I calculated my first fractal one cold winter night in the late Eighties in a dark room in a CAD facility in Stockholm, Sweden. The company had a lot of powerful computers and large color printers, providing graphic services and presentation prints for architects and advertising agencies.  

The computers and printers were the reasons I worked there, spending most of my time trying to learn all things digital, often working far into the night. I found the whole process of designing something on a computer screen and having it emerge in physical form magical, and I still do.

After the program had finished drawing the Mandelbrot Set on the glowing monitor, I drew a little zoom rectangle on a part of the fractal that looked interesting. The screen went dark, and then gradually started filling up, line by line, with a wild explosion of shapes and colors, carrying withing them even more shapes. I drew another little rectangle, and the same process repeated - only this time the shapes had mutated into new forms.

Out of the multitude of fractal worlds discovered after Mandelbrot’s breakthrough discovery of the Mandelbrot Set in the late 1970s, I've always retained a special love for that first, glittering world, with its infinite, swirling rain forests, crystals and algorithic chasms, and am still after so many years of exploration awed by its infinite, mystic beauty, and I'm still finding unexpected regions, shapes and patterns.

I find my solitary travels through the infinite depths of the Mandelbrot Set to be both meditative, challenging and rewarding.

Sometimes I document my travels, and over the past few years have also started to explore 3D fractals using Mandelbulb 3D.

I hope to be able to share my explorations with you and learn more about these worlds together.


(https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2918/13942200626_bf275cb8ea_b.jpg)

(https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3884/14910291861_90f48b59af_b.jpg)

hello and welcome to the forums, check out kalles fractaler or mandelmachine both implement a super efficient way to render ultra deep zoom images, you are going to like what you find down there!

welcome!
yeah, you'll really have fun with kf/mandelmachine.. boldly go where no man has gone before - better than star trek ;)

enjoy your stay!

Thank you, I most definitely will! I've never used UltraFractal that much because of it clumsy palette function, but have always wanted to go much deeper than I'm currently able to do, so this will be a very interesting change.

Are the coordinates compatible with UF?

Thank you! I'll be checking out Mandelmachine for sure, already downloaded it!

Coordinates or location from the Mandelbrot set should be universal. Only difference could be the way they are stored. Most common is storing the center coordinate and the size of the view (or zoom level). For the Burning Ship it could be a little more trickier between different programs, because the ship is either flipped around the horizontal axis or given a half turn (in order to see a floating ship with the mast upwards).

Thanks for sharing your story by the way. It's always nice to read how people gotten involved in something.  :beer:

Great to hear that. So you're able to basically cut and paste the coordinates between UF and MM?

I saw on list of upcoming features that MM will get better palette editing, it would be fantastic if they could implement something like color/palette functionality of the KPT5 fractal explorer, which is still my main choice for the Mandelbrot Set despite it's severe limitations regarding iterations and its inability to do deep zooms. No one has ever done a better, more intuitive and artistic UIX for fractal coloring/palettes than those guys did (Kai Krause et al).