Strange Alien Vistas

I’ve been messing around with a new fractal discovered only a few months ago dubbed The Mandelbulb. It has similar interesting visual properties to its forebear, the Mandelbrot fractal, but in three dimensions, which hadn’t been achieved until now.

Here are a few non-typical renderings of the Mandelbulb taken very close to the surface that I thought were interesting (click for full size):

I’ve been working on a viewer/explorer program based on Tom Beddard’s implementation of the algorithm. The viewer will let you fly around using the mouse and keyboard, set up flight paths and make recordings (using the same exporter functions as Gource). It’s not quite there yet, but hopefully after Linux Conf I’ll have some time to finish it off and make some videos.

I already have designs on what music I want to use. I’m thinking some Jarre.