We’re not dead again. The hosting is slow and stuff but it’s coming. The updates in the Mandelbulb will take a while but they are being prepared. As I’ve said, they’re addictive and when you start tweaking something you can easily lose a couple evenings doing so.

Please don’t expect (this applies to other formats of images made in other softwares as well) nothing like attempts to recreate a certain kind of landscape, an attempt to make certain object in a fractal form or anything like that, or images similar to those posts in fractal groups or artist comunnities that are succesful in terms of viewing and that are using exquisite techniques. Although I like these images (or some of them) my aim is to do what I like, not what others are doing by the thousands. Occasionally some of these images appear – but most of the time I was making something else. There will not be as I’ve said images made with IA or reworked with Photoshop by adding extra stuff. The most I’ll do with an image editor is to add a watermark and a few times some sharpening or noise removal (mostly with MB3D).

I was thinking lately besides the image galleries themselves also about how the other sections of the site will be, like the tutorials and articles about fractals I might include here. I am not a mathematician myself, and as I’ve mentioned somewhere else, I am more interested in the artistic and visual part of the fractal world and I have never studied them from that scientific point of view, nor am I able to write anything technical myself about them. My experience would be more in the graphical aspects and maybe in the operational part of certain softwares – how to get a better printable image, how to fix a few things, how to achieve some feature in a software… but nothing beyond this point. But… sometimes a few concepts should be understood even if briefly – if you want to go deeper or not, it’s up to you – so some of your fractal creations can be a little better understood as well so to speak if you know even a little about what is happening, as in “why a certain image has more details than others?” or “why does this formula X give me all these spirals?”, “why is there a black spot in my image?” and so on.

There are many more talented people mostly in the mathematical/scientific side of the fractal world that have written articles and made countless websites describing what are fractals, how do they “behave”, chaos theory, their applications in several aspects of science and they have made articles in a way that I would never be able to do, mostly in the technical side. I will try to sometimes replicate some of these ideas and concepts (always quoting the original authors!) and occasionally I’ll try to add simpler posts about specific subjects in the fractal world like for instance “what are iterations?”, but in a very brief and simple way, the way how I understood that subject so to speak and in a way that I could pass it along that others would also comprehend these concepts, but with additional supporting links to these more deeper articles for the visitors that are more interested in the technical aspects of the fractals, which is not usually my cup of tea for my lack of advanced skills in mathematics or just because they are too nerdy for my tastes and start to get boring after a while if you’re not a scientist, amateur or not. I won’t get too deep though (I’ll use a few iterations!), just trying to touch the surface of these subjects, enough for you to understand the basic concepts.

Iterations

The noun iteration comes from the Latin verb iterum, which means “again,” which makes a lot of sense when you consider the meaning of the word, “the act of repeating.” (Source)

1. noun doing or saying again; a repeated performance
2. noun (computer science) executing the same set of instructions a given number of times or until a specified result is obtained “the solution is obtained by iteration” synonyms: looping
3. noun (computer science) a single execution of a set of instructions that are to be repeated “the solution took hundreds of iterations” synonyms: loop type of: physical process, process a sustained phenomenon or one marked by gradual changes through a series of states

The next update is taking a bit longer than I wanted but that’s because I’m rendering most of the Mandelbulbs again with a better quality whenever possible (or when it’s worth it) after I got this new 28″ monitor, which helps a lot to find small issues on images, and also I’m trying to use the Monte Carlo rendering on them with that same definition (and it takes a long time depending on the image), some fractals don’t really change or improve with it but some get interesting new features regarding the lights, shadows and textures (and even the original colours). I’ll keep these high resolution images to myself as usual but will post the smaller versions as usual.

Some of the original Mandelbulbs were slightly edited/tweaked to fix these small things, and a couple more images always appear from some of these tweaks. That’s the problem with fractals, mostly with these in 3D: you start exploring an image and you end up in another world with a zillion new images. Also, some of the old images while being fixed look better if tweaked to something a bit more interesting, complex, or just more colourful. I think I will also try some extra tweaks using the mutation tab to see if something else appears that is as interesting as the source image. Sometimes it makes some images that are too complex adding unnecessary formulas and parameter values and even crashes a lot, but it’s a fun thing to do. I’m also learning some new techniques that I might use in future images… one nice thing I just learned is that Mandelbulb 3D has this “History” folder where it keeps sort of a backup of ALL your images parameter files (the files are just 2k in size anyway). Sometimes when it crashes it can be useful to try to restore something you were working on right before the crash. I didn’t browse everything yet but for sure there might be something there that was “lost” before a crash (which happens quite frequently…) that might be recoverable. I found that I had some sub-folders there dating back from 2019… unfortunately it just had the default image. Sometimes if you didn’t make any changes to the default fractal or didn’t save anything it just keeps track of when you open the software (date, time and name of the file if saved are all included in these entries), and saves these backups with the default fractal.

I’ll be away from the computer where I make all that stuff for a couple weeks, so there won’t be any updates until maybe next month. I’m actually back, but not really good enough to update anything yet… the site isn’t getting too much attention anyway…

9 galleries of Jwildfire images done, 180 images! I might try to recreate some of these images using the GPU render mode whenever possible to see what happens. If there are significant differences and the results are nicer images, they might be added.

Next step: Mandelbulb 3D images. I’ll check their sizes and maybe render them again with the best quality possible to avoid ugly parts like spots, etc. and also I might try to render some using the Monte Carlo (path tracing) rendering, which sometimes gives great results and very nice and much more natural looking images with nice shadows and lights.

This is a test. It’s the most viewed video of my fractal animations in my Youtube channel (but it’s not my favourite…). I had to allow the embedding of the video to make it work. It’s not the perfect method to have them posted here. I really don’t want it to work like this, other people might be able to embed the video in their own websites as well… I will not be publishing all the videos I make here if the only way is to let them be embedded, I’d rather just use the link to the video instead.