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Here are some Koch fractals I have made recently. I'll keep the explanations minimal, since the rules are mostly self-evident from looking at them.

I started in 2-dimensions, beginning with the classic Koch Snowflake fractal and recursively subdividing it into 6 smaller snowflakes and one larger (but still smaller than the original) snowflake in the centre, like so:



I colourised the fractal by giving each layer of snowflakes a contribution factor, which influenced how much the colouring affected the pixel. Each time I subdivided and recursed, the contribution factor for snowflakes at that level was halved. Since each pixel is in a different snowflake depending on the recursion level, I summed the colourisation at each level of recursion (multiplied by the contribution factor for that recursion level) over all the levels of recursion (I went about 6 levels deep). Up-and-down pointing snowflakes were coloured black, side-to-side pointing snowflakes were coloured white. After adding over all the recursion layers the result was various shades of grey.

I made a little GIF animation showing continuous zooming into the centre of the fractal (I just cross fade while zooming, so the colourisation adapts as it goes, as if the contrast knob is gradually being cranked up):

Koch Snowflake zoom animation

Next, I tried using a 2D circle-inversion transform to distort the fractal. I colourised it using GIMP, and added an "all-seeing eye" symbol to make it more interesting:



Looking at the top image, an idea suggested itself: the roughly hexagonal meandering outline of the Koch Snowflake suggests the outline of a cube viewed at a 45 degree angle, looking diagonally at one of the vertices. I played around with this idea and figured out that you can make all the "dents" in the outline of the snowflake by chopping away at this cube - the trianglular insets of the 2D Koch Snowflake corresponding to insets in the cube's surface.

The rule to create this cube-based 3D fractal is simple: Start off with a cube of width n, and then attach 8 smaller cubes of width n / 3, centred on the 8 vertices of the original cube. Apply this recursively and voila!



When rendered in an isometric projection, the outline of this object forms the Koch Snowflake:



This means that if you project an infinite, directional lightsource at the object from a diagonal 45 degree angle, a perfect outline of the Koch Snowflake will be cast onto any flat surface behind it.

Hope you like the images 

Cheers,
Chris Hayton

Thanks 

The Koch Snowflake overlaid two different ways with Metatron's Cube:





 and the Flower of Life pattern:



"Sacred Geometry" symbols are a good source of inspiration and ideas for fractals in my opinion.

those designs are awesome, there's an excellent matchup between them and the fractals!

about the rendering though: blurring is not the same as antialiasing a simple way to draw antialiased circles is by a distance check; you do many of these within the "area" of a pixel (pixels don't have area, but that needs more explanation) and average the results - the result can be made reasonably smooth. btw, this handles the intersection of your circles perfectly, whereas opengl's line rendering can't. yesyes it's a lot slower, but you can also do it in an opengl pixelshader if you like, and the results are definitely worth it

oh and your koch zooming animation ruuuules!!

Same thing with octahedrons:





It should be possible to get a Koch Snowflake silhouette by placing the smaller octahedrons on the vertices of the larger one, instead of on the faces (as above). I think it will work several other ways with cubes as well (such as placing the smaller cubes on the lines connecting the vertices instead of one the vertices themselves). I'm going to give tetrahedrons and spheres a go tomorrow night after work

Wow.

Just... Wow.

Thanks for the compliments Margit and Sockratease

Here's a couple more renders, showing another octahedron-based variation of the solid with the smaller octahedrons positioned on the vertices instead floating off the faces of the larger octahedron.

Perspective:



Isometric:

pretty recently actually: http://ompf.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=336

This is inspirational!

I will be experimenting with programming my own fractal stuff once I learn how these new-fangled computers think!!