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Hello everyone! I am a senior mathematics student and I was hoping to get some ideas about my senior capstone project. My task is this: I must find the best way to represent our school's mascot as a fractal or collection of fractals. I am new to the subject of fractals, and I was wondering if anybody had any ideas of how to begin to tackle this project. Will it just involve tons of guessing and checking? Also, I just downloaded ChaosPro, but if you know of a  program that will fit my purpose better, I'm all ears. :) Thanks so much! I attached a picture of my mascot .

I would begin by looking into fractals in general and learning about the different types of shapes that they typically have.  Then, you might begin developing a sense of what would work better.  In particular, you probably want to learn about L-system fractals.  Mascots and logos tend to be the opposite of fractal--relatively simple shapes so that they can be resized and recognizeable at any scale.  I'm sure you can re-create your logo within a fractal program, but that's not the same as re-creating the logo as an assemblage of fractals.  Good luck and have fun!

hello and welcome, a little tip, your logo is symetrical at the y axis, so you only need to create one halve of the logo ;)

Apophysis Flames would work well for that project maybe, lots of Birdlike Flames appear at random

Here is one idea to get your juices flowing, a quick 5 min mask using ps.   :canadian:

You might consider using a biomorph algorithm proposed by Dawkins. It essentially uses a evolutionary process to search large configuration spaces to produce desired shapes. For example the following generalization of the Mandelbrot.



The varibles are free parameters. At each selection step you produce 8 or so new sets of parameters which are slightly varied from the original, then  render all them all along with the original. Pick the one that you like best and re-iterate.

The second order Mandelbrot is probably not varied enough to produce the desired image, but you can alway go to higher powers. Throw in some trig functions etc.

There are even a few fractal generators that work well using images and complex projections

(http://i106.photobucket.com/albums/m278/sockratease/beaky.jpg)

That was the first thing that popped out of Mutatorkammer when I put in the picture and just played randomly for 30 seconds!

If you want to make it out of a "pure" fractal, I think the basic outline could be acheived - or something close to it - but it's unlikely you could get something recognizable as the mascot without some sort of image editing tricks in post-work.

Good luck with the idea!

As obvious as that is...I probably wouldn't have realized it, thanks! :)

Thank you everyone for your ideas and suggestions. I will update you and let you know how it's coming!