Spiral Kaleidoscope

[Duncan C]

I created this kaleidoscope starting from a fairly ordinary Mandelbrot spiral plotted in 3D.


(Be sure to click on the image to view the larger version in my PBase gallery. It looks better even bigger, but I didn't want to post that to the net.)

I've been toying with the idea of adding a kaleidoscope generator to FractalWorks. It's a bit "off topic" for a fractal renderer, but it would be handy. Animated fractal kaleidoscopes would be very cool. Imagine a kaleidoscope based on rotated and reflected triangular "slices" of a fractal image. Now imagine that the triangle is rotating and panning through the image, like a ball bouncing around in a 2D video game. As the triangle moves through the image, the area of the image it outlines becomes the source for the kaleidoscope. This should produce an effect rather like that with a real kaleidoscope.


Duncan C

[cKleinhuis]

excellent pircture duncan, amazingly sharp, nice use of anti alias !!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Duncan C]

excellent pircture duncan, amazingly sharp, nice use of anti alias !!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Trifox,

Thanks,

I must confess, I cheat on the anti-aliasing. I create my images at double size, then downsample them in Photoshop using bicubic sharper. I haven't tackled anti-aliasing in my program yet.

Duncan C

[lycium]

depends how you define "cheating"; if you want to get the best possible image (and i too was admiring the crisp reproduction -- you seem to have used a high rate of supersampling ) then leveraging the best available program to do it hardly warrants the label. that's my opinion though, having implemented good aa myself and found that people who use photoshop are just as well off

i have however found that using a simple 1 2 1 filter (centre = 2) in x and then in y works very well when you're doing 2:1 reduction. it's a linear filter, the so-called "tent" filter because of its shape in 2d, so no troublesome splines and negative values etc. it's really fast to compute, and the results are very crisp

more info about it can be found in my comments here