Turn the crank

This is a small offshoot of a project I'm working on: a distraction which turned out to be quite nice on its own.

untitled [mecha-noir]

Zoomable!

Finally, with some help from my able assistant (who knows how to talk to the terminal window) I've gotten the process working, and put a large zoomable fractal online. If this one seems to work out all right, and doesn't give my web host trouble, I'll do some more.

Rusting Dragon



This was one of my contest entries. I like the metallic texture that becomes visible when the picture is magnified, and I also like the sort of hunched, brooding quality of the thing. It reminds me both of the shipping cranes down in the industrial end of town, and of my cat, when she's tensely coiled and watching pigeons. Motionless, but with the sense that it might do something if you turned your back and didn't watch it too closely. Or that it's only standing still because it's been there for an enormously long time, in all sorts of weather, and all its gears and pulleys have corroded and fused themselves into immobility.

How much is too much?

My misgivings about the potential uses of the image importer are sorting themselves into two basic categories, thusly:

1. It's too easy.
2. It's too hard.

Unhelpful, that. The easiness is simply that once you learn the basic technique, there's nothing at all to stop you from dropping any image, or dozen images, into any fractal. This results in both a sort of whee, fun! effect, and the usual vague disquiet common to fractal art, the part that says this is way too easy and fun; I'm just sitting here pushing buttons, it can't possibly count as anything serious.

The hard part, though, is that you have to be careful about which pictures you use. They need to be fairly high resolution, even for a smallish screen-sized render, because the distortions introduced by the orbit trapping tend to magnify certain bits enormously, and the resulting pixelation can be quite noticeable. Once you have your high-resolution image, it has to be very carefully cleaned up in Photoshop (or equivalent) to get the alpha channel tidy. Even if the pixelation isn't a problem in the main part of the imported image, the edges can start looking ragged very quickly.

So in addition to needing some substantial background in using Ultra Fractal, you also need a reasonable familiarity with some graphics editor. And this is even before getting into questions of the aesthetic merit of the resulting conglomerations. Fractals are inherently complex things, and adding photographs to them is a whole new and different kind of complexity. A photograph of a single-colored object is never a single color; it has highlights and shadows and reflected colors from the surrounding environment, it has variations introduced by the lighting and noise from the film grain or CCD. It's made up of hundreds or even thousands of variations on the general palette, in shadings that may or may not be smooth. By comparison with photographs, I've been finding it kind of amazing to realize just how smooth and orderly fractals really are. In trying to combine the two, keeping the look and feel of the whole image consistent becomes more difficult because the intrinsic textures are so dissimilar.

I worry that the easy factors combined with the hard factors will produce an end result of many pictures made with little attention to the technical details. Heh, and having typed that, I realize that it's a perfectly good description of all fractal art, and indeed most digital art in general. Easy to do, not necessarily easy to do justice to. I should probably stop worrying about it, and just keep experimenting. Because, hey, whee fun!

I can follow up yesterday's introductory noisemaker with a full orchestral performance on the

Illuminated Musical Contraption


It may be worth pointing out that I have actually kept this one quite controlled. The color palette is restricted to a blue-orange-yellow split complement, and the overall composition is structured around a couple of major vertical arcs. However, in spite of my attempts at restraint, the effect is more or less completely ZOWIE BLAMMO, and the thing looks it should play a selection of Raymond Scott's greatest hits.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN

NOW APPEARING!

* The Wonderful Fractalodeon *
in full life-like color

The Like of Which has Never Previously Been Displayed.

Flourish


Baffles even the most learned
Professors
&
Men of Science.
Actually it seems to have put the Professor to sleep. Probably I should give the ballyhoo a rest, too. I am indebted to Wikipedia for the use of their French horn.

A light bulb

Today I tried using the image import feature, for the first time since my couple of brief experiments when UF5 first came out. I'm still substantially intimidated by it, mainly because it adds such a large new dimension of possibilities to an already overwhelming number of choices. How in the world can I ever manage to decide what pictures I need infinitely many of?

I've gotten used to the idea of fractals being, for the most part, purely abstract. They don't necessarily need to mean anything, they just need to be arranged in pleasing compositions of color and shape. The thing about importing images is that it instantly changes the picture from abstract and non-threatening to concrete, specific, nailed-down and potentially fraught with meaning. Suddenly I have to think about concept, which I am exceedingly wary of. It's the sort of thing required by art school, and beloved of the kinds of artists I really dislike. I don't want my stuff to turn into Political!Art! all full of sleek graphical representations of talking-heads-of-state or Hitler's brain on drugs or what have you.

Except that I've also spent a fair amount of time in the last several months making fractals that are definitely illustrations, and approach something like recognizable. Sometimes I even have a concept in mind, much as I might hate to admit it.

So I figured it was time to drag out some of my favorite recurring motifs, the ones I'm comfortable with, and put them into fractals to see what they do. I started with this light bulb.

A Light Bulb



A Julia set introduced some nice distortions, making the shape more globe-like. But it's still quite recognizable, and not terribly interesting except that it makes kind of a good dark/light pattern.

Julia Bulbs



I had another fractal window open, with a different picture I'd been working on, an Ikenaga Roots-Mandel. So I tried pasting the image trap into one of the layers, and ended up with something like a steam-powered carpet slipper.

Brass Slippers



This one seems cheerfully bizarre enough that I'd like to pursue it further, and maybe add some layers with more images: say, a tuba or something. It would be fun to see if I could make some really ridiculous fractal contraptions. Or, y'know, talking-heads-of-state.

More gears

After this, I really should put the gears away for a bit, and try something else for a change. But I couldn't pass up the overlapping stacked-up effect on this one.

Aleph-17 Jewel Movement



The jewels don't show very well on a screen-sized render, but at print resolution they're very shiny and detailed: an excellent example of detail at many scales.

[jewel detail]



Can fractals be steampunk? I suppose they're quite anachronistic, but then so are robots. So they probably can.

Clockwork orange brown

Here's the more complicated image I was working on yesterday. I messed with it a bunch today, as well, and I think maybe now it's done.

Keeping Time



I'm all pleased with myself, because I've figured out how to make the gear shapes using a single layer of orbit traps, instead of two layers. The teeth used to be one, and the center ring or disc used to be another, but now I've got them all crammed into one unit. This isn't even anything to do with UF5; I could have been doing it in UF3, but until now I hadn't learned how the Multiple Traps thing works. Now I've given it a concerted effort, and I know more than I did. It's somewhat fiddly, but it makes the coloring of the gears a lot easier, and avoids certain annoying discontinuities.

Where do I go from here?

A new semester has started, and I'm wishing I knew what direction to go. Now is when I need to be thinking about themes and ideas and imagery, and I'm feeling awfully blank. I wish I had a compass and a map, or a set of handy directions.

untitled [navigational instruments]

Run through the mangle

I wish these calculations had been performed by steam.
— Charles Babbage

I'm back to my ongoing theme of gears and machinery. And I'm also back to my ongoing theme of refraction spectra. Appropriately enough, I spent most of today being processed through bureaucratic machinery (grind grind crank crank arrgh), but ended up with a more-or-less positive result. Sometimes I feel that my imagery is altogether too simple and obvious.

Calculation by Steam



Frame-Robert formula. Nine layers, two of them masked.