Distance Fractals
January 15, 2013
Have been playing around with the latest in fractal art concepts, namely Distance Fractals. There’s some fabulous open source Processing code here.
I often wonder, at being so disappointed at the generic, hackneyed sci-fi worlds in the likes of Prometheus and Avatar – why not give the art director & CGI job of such films to a code artist?
CGI in movies has become cheap and lazy – the FX are no longer special. Surely, something like this fractal technology, pushing the frontiers of science and art, should be what sci-fi film makers should be embracing to show us worlds we’ve never seen OR imagined before.
I created my own small gallery of work, by hacking the code, tweaking the numbers. The availability of this amazing new math art is just half the battle. One still must explore its world, find composition, drama, a hidden painting – the eye of the code artist changes the numbers, but also must search for the vision.
Butterfly 
[…] to my last post ‘Distance Fractals’, I thought I’d write a bit more on it, as it seems to be my new […]
Hi, I agree with you that we are not seeing fractals in enough different applications. Personally as an artist and game dev I would like to see them used more in games. I am no coder yet but I’m interested to learn and want to try make an abstract survival game set in a constantly morphing fractal. Not sure how possible this is at the current time, whether fractals can feasibly be rendered real-time, and how physics interactions with them could be handled.
You should check you what’s possible with Ray Marching in general
https://www.shadertoy.com
I think the first game world using this technique would be amazing!
Glenn.