putting Fractals into Blender and OpenSim

[LarysaF]

Oh well, it says "Introduce Myself", and there's only 41 pages of "Hello From..."

I am a maths student, living in Australia.  We're doing Complex Analysis this semester.  And I thought, "Aha, it's time to crack open the Fractal Explorer again, and visualise complex numbers."  I've just taken in quaternions.  I'm interesting in making 3D fractal meshes so I can put them in Blender, and then into OpenSim, and have avatars walking on them or flying through them.

Next year I want to do glaciology.

And now, back to maths...

[youhn]

For Blender I noticed the currently active "A Cube a Day experiment" on Twitter.



I did not have time too study the details, but it looks fractal. The rule is something like "just 1 cube, don't touch the geometry directly. Use modifiers, scripts, etc). Sounds interesting ... I should play around in Blender again (it has been some years ago).

Sources:
https://twitter.com/search?q=DefaultCubism
http://blog.mikepan.com/post/80514193911/default-cubism-rules

[Sockratease]

Oh well, it says "Introduce Myself", and there's only 41 pages
of "Hello From..."

I am a maths student, living in Australia.  We're doing Complex Analysis this semester.  And I thought, "Aha, it's time to crack open the Fractal Explorer again, and visualise complex numbers."  I've just taken in quaternions. I'm interesting in making 3D fractal meshes so I can put them in Blender, and then into OpenSim, and have avatars walking on
them or flying through them.

Next year I want to do glaciology.

And now, back to maths...

Hello and welcome to the forums  o0

The process of getting a fractal into a 3D Program as a mesh is ...  tricky.

The meshes are always very high polygon - most often prohibitively high for any effective use in something like OpenSim  (if I understand that the mesh itself must be used and not just images rendered from it).

What software are you using for the fractals, as each program can have it's own way of making the mesh  (everything from Direct .obj Export to Voxel Stacks to stl files and probably more!).

This is still my favorite use of a Mandelbulb in Carrara  (my 3D Program of choice!)



Cows just Love having Mandelbulbs dropped on their heads   

Feel free to post some of your own works here, in our Gallery, or in our upcoming Annual Contest  (Starting soon!).

[LarysaF]

Right now, working out how Blender makes a crumpled piece of paper, by sub-dividing a plane, fractally.  But i'm tired now, and I'll do this again later.  Apparently it's the F6 menu with edit on and subdividing the plane.  But opensim does not like it.  Too many polygons.  Been using decimate to reduce polygon count in Blender.

For the actual Fractals, I've got Fractal Explorer.  What I'm most interested in is that Blender handles an .obj file for a quaternion that I picked up in the forums yesterday.  I decimated that, and then that uploaded to OpenSim.

I'll keep trawling for something that churns out an .obj.  I will fork out for Ultra Fractal, but not right now.  Maybe tomorrow?

[Sockratease]

For the actual Fractals, I've got Fractal Explorer  ...  I will fork out for Ultra Fractal, but not right now.  Maybe tomorrow?

I don't have Fractal Explorer, but don't think it does 3D Meshing, does it?

Try ChaosPro - it's free and has limited obj export possibilities  :  http://www.chaospro.de

Also, Mandelbulb3D can export Voxel Stacks which can be converted to obj using a program called FIJI  (both are free and MB3D is in our Downloads section!).  There are other ways to convert the voxel stack, but I found best results with fiji.

Speaking of best results - be certain to use the trial of UltraFractal before buying!  While many, many people swear by it - I found UF to be ...  well...  Bad.

It has no real 3D Capability without extensive work and no 3D Format Export at all.  It's interface confuses me  (but MANY people insist  UF is the best out there, so take that with a Pillar of salt!) and it's system of rendering animations is totally unprofessional  (I have spoken with the programmer of UF about this and a fix was promised but never delivered).

Terry Gintz has a series of commercial Fractal Programs that all export obj files.  So does Xenodream (limited version is free, pay for better export options!).  And Incendia exports obj files as well (and it's free).

Hope that helps get you started and I look forward to your results