Senior Capstone

[emmay1]

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 .

[lkmitch]

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!

[cKleinhuis]

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

[lenord]

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

[tomot]

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

[fractower]

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.

[Sockratease]

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



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!

[emmay1]

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

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!