To make things more consistent I’ve finished renaming all the galleries, now they are called “Fractal Gallery XX” instead of just “Gallery”. The reason for this change is quite obvious when you think about searches in Google for fractals and image galleries. Also, another page for the galleries 21 to 30 was added to the main menu. It seems that it’s the preferred way to browse and find the images, as it’s not easy to go through all the posts to find the galleries, and the search and tags isn’t very precise (it’s not the right word though) at times and gives more results than you would like to visit if you are looking just for an image gallery. If a post is tagged with “image” or “fractal” or “gallery” (lots of posts have the first two tags) it will appear in the same search along with the actual gallery posts. Tags are really strange… I’ve also just found that in WordPress the tags for the images in the image galleries aren’t the same as tags used in posts and are in fact different entities, like for example the tag “abstract” that appears in a lot of images in the galleries, but it isn’t listed in my most used tags list. In fact, it has zero entries in posts, so making a search like “abstract fractal” won’t return any results… same happened with some other relatively important tags, like “3D/3-D”.
Tag Archive: 3-D
OK, let’s try this Mandelbulb 3D a little more seriously.
It doesn’t seem that slow, not in a quadcore with 4Gb of RAM. And it seems a bit of fun, more or less like making some random “caves” in Bryce and exploring the different parts of it. I just did a quick test, using basically the default settings (but the parameters and formula), and here it goes:

Gold City
Right-click and choose “view image” or something similar according to your browser and it will open in its original size where you can see (some) of the details. I did a bigger render, but it’s uploaded in 1024 x 768.
I didn’t even bother to zoom in and explore all these details or else I’d be stuck in this city for days. Somehow it reminds me of Amsterdam or at least this is how I imagine it to be if it was a fractal.
I don’t plan to make too many of these images right now (why not have a look at my other images if you happened to find this post just because you were searching for Mandelbulbs?), it’s sort of a brand new kind of fractal and there aren’t even decent tutorials for Mandelbulbs so far so I am a bit stuck although I can make some basic images already like this one displayed above. I haven’t found any tutorials, at least. It’s fun to play with this but it’s hard to make something useful without much guides of what can or should be done to get useful results and not get lost waiting for a useless render and I’m not very fond of exploring this beast using a trial and error method right now, anyone that ever tried a fractal software using this method probably got seriously frustrated at some point.
If you want to download the Mandelbulb generator, I found it in the Fractal Forum, here’s the link to the page where you can download it.