(Sorry if this is nothing new.)

I liked Tek's recent work so much that I decided to use the trace macro with
a Julia myself to see if I can do something similar. I used cylinders first
for a simple fur but I accidentally set their thickness way to high, and
the resulting image gave me an idea: a fractal with "real" cracks in it.
Here it is, 225,000 cylinders:

http://gero.progressive.hu/trace1.jpg

I know my crack pattern is lame, so feel free to help me improve it. :)

When I finished I had to admit to myself that the same thing can be done
with CSG without the artifacts. But the idea came that I can *twist* this
fractal (something I always wanted to do). I used vaxis_rotate on the base
points and the normals which resulted in this. Way more errors on the
surface, either the whole approach is wrong or I messed up my code, but
anyway:

http://gero.progressive.hu/trace2.jpg

For this last image I replaced the cylinders with spheres and got a noisy
but natural looking surface:

http://gero.progressive.hu/trace3.jpg

The renders took about five minutes, mostly parse time. Surely I want to see
it twist in an animation, and it will. :)

--
Cheers,
Gergely

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Gergely Vandor wrote:

>I know my crack pattern is lame, so feel free to help me improve it. :)
>
Use a 2D Julia or Mandlebrot or suchlike mapped to the  surface; where it
exceeds
threshhold, have crack, and where it doesn't, have surface (or vice versa).
You'll probably want to use a tiny range if you use mandlebrot, but some
julias,
IIRC, have a nice thin spidery pattern in their 2D interpretation.

--Chris

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