My Best Portal Impression and a Blind Venture into Fractal Art.

By Akrid June 6, 2011 1 Comments

 

I did this model. Nothing to write home about. The inspiration should be pretty clear. It was meant as a speed modelling challenge to ease me back in to working again, Though it quickly became less than speedy. Pretty well 95% of what you see was made within a couple of hours, but I always end up spending several hours on top of that trying to find ways to make it better. Any improvement I gained from this is decidedly artificial, my time would have been better spent making the model again than scrutinizing it and trying to escape the confines of what I had already wrought. I found it really hard to escape from a concentric design, and it was difficult to find ample justification to break the silhouette of the sphere. 
 
This is still in progress. I have some pretty ambitious plans for this guy, so hopefully it'll turn out well. 
 

I also messed around with a program called Chaoscope. 

 

Chaoscope is a free program that makes beautiful things with math that I cannot even pretend to understand. Yet despite this ignorance I was able to operate it to it's fullest potential. 
 

There are obviously very complex things going on within this program, but on a surface level it's dead simple: You choose the attractor, each it's own equation that defines how points are plotted in 3d space. Once chosen you'll be presented by an intimidating list of arcane parameters. The great thing here is that you will never have to worry about those if you don't want to. Hit F3 and those parameters will randomize, giving you a bona fide piece of fractal art in a split second. If you find something you like but isn't quite there yet, lowering the randomization parameter will narrow your search, changing each parameter by only a small degree rather than changing it to a completely different number. It's with this method that you can quickly narrow your search to something you want.
 

You then choose the rendering modes, and this is where the program really shines. Much of fractal art tends to be extremely gaudy and 90's-looking, often largely in part because of the quality of the renderer. Chaoscope solves this by offering a narrower breadth of options - in comparison to something like xenodream - and executing them very well. It's this commitment to quality that makes Chaoscope so fantastic. Updates continue to be carefully dripped out through several years of development, and there are plans to keep going for a long time yet if the version number is any indication (0.3.1). There are only a handful of rendering modes: gas, liquid, light, plasma, and solid. All of them look and work beautifully, with the exception of the solid mode which is gimped by a lack of antialiasing, long render times, poor meshing, and need for extremely high iterations. It's a sort of "between versions" implementation. The other downer is that there is no gradient editor, an essential part of all of the rendering modes. Instead you can only randomize colors and save the ones you like for later use.
 

Speaking of iterations, they're what determine the quality of the render. The default value of 20 million is good for preview or low resolution rendering, but you'd probably want to increase it some regardless. Adding zeroes will essentially times your quality by 10, but it'll also times your rendering time by 10. At default iterations I get something like 6 seconds, at high quality no more then 15-20mins.
 

Chaoscope produces things that should take careful and concise work and makes it so simple that it feels like a toy. What once would earn someone the reputation of an artist has now been democratized to the point where it loses any meaning. I could not, in good conscience, claim that anything I made with the program as my art. In fact, anything produced from the program could almost be considered the developers art by default and we are merely cycling through it. The person who presses the button to make a beautiful painting is not the artist, the one who made the button is.
 
Oh yeah, did I mention this program is totally free? Go get it, make stuff, and post it here! It's really easy.

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