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About fourteen months ago, the supervising art director for the Marvel film, "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.2" contacted me asking if I would like to do some visual consulting work, possibly as a conceptual artist on the film.

My first reaction was that it simply couldn't be true. So I cautiously replied to the email, explaining the limitations of what I could and couldn't do with Mandelbulb 3D. A dozen or so emails and a few phone calls later, I signed a non disclosure agreement, (plus a few other agreements) and promptly began work.

One of the agreements forbade me of even mentioning any involvement whatsoever with the project unless given express permission. I never even asked them for permission until some of the trailers for the movie started coming out, and then some people in the fractal community started spotting some fractal elements in a few of the scenes.

I'm still bound by the agreements I signed to not provide any specific details on the work I did nor reveal any artwork I contributed. I really can't talk much about it at all in detail yet. But I did ask for and received permission to tell my family and friends that I did indeed work on the Marvel film, "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2".

It was such an honor to work with all the very kind people on the film, and on such a huge project. At first I felt like I was in so far over my head! I was nervous as hell. But the people I dealt with were very nice and made it easy for me to feel like I fit in, and was an integral, contributing part of the project. It really couldn't have been a better experience.

I also wanted to thank everyone on Deviant Art, Fractal Forums, (specifically Jesse and all others involved with creating Mandelbulb 3D, Luca for formulas and Christian Kleinhuis for hosting the forums) and Facebook that have been kind and generous enough to encourage me by faving, commenting and liking my artwork. All of that gracious support is what drove me to try not to be better than anyone else, but to be as good as I could possibly be at creating my own visions, and making my own style of art. "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2" Release Date: 5 May 2017

nice to hear, it is in fact tremendous news, part1 was already using many many fractal elements that originate here in the forums, i personally find it very good although fractals dominate film making in general like clouds and landscapes generated through them seeing the new 3d ones used like that is awesome and certainly leads to a wider audience wanting to know what is all about them

Thanks Christian~ Some of the imagery should be very recognizable as coming from Mandelbulb 3D. They (Marvel) are so secretive about the film, that even though I worked on it, I have no idea how much will be seen, or how the images are going to be used, other than a few concept images I saw.

Cooooool!
Congratulations haltenny!  :)

Thanks very much!

Very cool story.  :beer:

Many thanks~

Cool stuff. I remember a thread a while ago pointing out some sort of Apollonian Gasket-style 3D fractal in the trailer and speculation that someone on this forum was working on the movie. Also seem to recall that Kali had been contacted about it but couldn't get involved in the project due to personal reasons.

Not sure how much you can really reveal, but I'm wondering how they went about incorporating the render into their movie. From what I've seen from Julius Horsthuis's instructional videos, M3D is extremely limited in terms of how it interacts with other programs. You only have the main render and a Z-buffer to work with, no transparency layers or any other things to work with. Did you do a relatively basic animation render and then have Marvel get their own team to do all the fancy post-work special effects, or was a lot of it actually done directly in M3D? One thing I notice a lot is that the better animation makers don't even use the depth of field in M3D because the z-buffer can be used in After Effects or another program to create much more impressive work.

Thanks Fitz~ I saw that thread, and I'm not certain Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is the same project Kali was contacted about. There's no way for me to know. I can say I was not contacted by Luma Pictures. I was contacted directly by the supervising art director from the production company, LevelUp Productions. I can't say exactly how the concept images I sent were used. But I didn't do anything like animations. I don't think I can safely say more about it because of the NDA I signed, sorry.

It will be the fifth of May soon. :)

I do hope they will ask you again for future movie projects Hal.

awesome! contragtulations on this!

Part one is already on my alltime favourite movies list - now I really can't wait to see part two!

Yes looking forward to it myself of course. It would be awesome to do another project of this nature, one can only hope! Thanks!

Thanks much! One of my favorites too~

Conratulations Haltenny, you really deserve to be chosen to collaborate on the film

Thank you~

Wow, Conratulations Haltenny.   :beer:
Indeed an honor to be part in such a huge movie. I'm so glad for you and I can't wait to see the movie, I loved part one, absolutely a favourite.
Enjoy this time of great excitement, have fun!  :)

Thanks very much!

 "definately is dr strange the ultimate fractal film :D" <- wrong post by me

people, do i sense a huge wave of chaos theory usage in popular media? dr strange, guardians of the galaxy, and just watching dirk gentleys hollistic series on netflix hehe, at least one mandelbrot spottet inside so far, is this driving more attention to our cause? i believe so, lean back and watch

I think it's about "bang for the buck", to have an artist paint or created these things by hand would be $$$ prohibitive but a consumer grade gfx card can render reasonably fast, so these fantastic scenes are going to be more and more prevalent in sci-fi fantasy films as the technology advances... :D 10 years from now we will look back and giggle at the primitive methods.

i propose a long time ago a full fledged distance method renderer and object construction, mandelbulber has come close to what i imagine, i wonder if the tools they create for these fractals in movies will at some point be accessible to a broad audience, i am sure they produce a whole lot of awesome utilities managing all the parameters and camera pathes at perfect match rates for post processing ... ;/

and i certainly do hope they make massive use of hybrid fractals ;)





*sorry for hijacking this thread hal

:) I wish I could say more about it. Part of the thing about it too is they didn't tell me much about how they were going to use the work I sent. I couldn't hardly give away any secrets about the film, because I don't know any! They only let me see a very few concept images. I did send them quite a few sample .obj's from voxel stacks. Quite a few images and some parameters too. Pretty sure the mandelbulb work will be quite recognizable. Just have to wait and see.

you already said enough to get us (me) hyped - especcially right after i realized the use of mandelbox in dr strange ( side note, anyone remembers "big hero6" use of mandelbulb? )

Just seen Guardians, and decided to make an account just to tell everyone how amazing the movie is.
Seriously. Go watch it (in 3d!) if you can.

Also I really love how marvel keeps using fractals in their movies (big hero 6, Dr.Strange and now guardians).

Are their any other movies that have fractals in them? (apart from interstellar)

Suicide squad.

Huge Kudo's for such an awesome gig! There are people all over da, FaceBook as well as here that are thrilled for you!

While I have some idea of this particular group of Marvel anti heroes it is the fractal dynamics and olouration I saw in the film that deserves comment.
Great Job!
By now I see fractal designs and geometries everywhere and so they are  not unusual. But now I know one of our community gnerated that dynamic imagery and 3d environment it confirms my opinion of th vital importance of Fractlforums .com going forward for the next generations .
Being a product of the Marvel and DC worlds myself, I recognise how much they influenced my young mind bout human potential and ingenuity..
Fractal spaciometry and dynamics will guide the next generation of technologists, scientists and designers and artisans. And this community has a major role to play in that future.

I'm not sure how much I can say about this but I will find out and try to post some information about how it was done.

Here's an article from fxguide, a website dedicated to the special effects industry:
The fractal nature of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (https://www.fxguide.com/featured/the-fractal-nature-of-guardians-of-the-galaxy-vol-2/).
It's fairly lengthy, and mentions Hal Tenny, FractalForums, and Mandelbulb3D several times (sometimes as "Mandelblub"?!).

I thought the photogrammetry applied to mb3d produced images was just a brilliant solution.

great find, th for sharing with us!

It certainly gets rid of tons of invisible geometry inside the fractals, while still retaining pretty much everything that can be seen from the outside.

I liked their approach to controlling shapes: just slice and dice arbitrary pieces from of a given fractal and use them as building blocks later in an ordinary modeler.

After this kind of groundbreaking pioneer work, fractals will soon be so ubiquitous in movies that we'll all be totally fed up. :)

  I saw the Mandelbulb scene in Big Hero 6 last night!