On 12/17/2010 7:30 PM, Patrick Elliott wrote:
> Main thing I find *slightly* annoying about these things though..
> Basically, most things have some sort of clear constraint when an
> object. Fractals *tend* not to necessarily have them, which makes it a
> bit hard to say, limit the object to a given size, piece, fragment,
> etc., or change it so that it grows "on" something, like one of the
> corral like ones grown on the surface of a sphere, for example. It gets
> really bad if it is something like Mandelbrot, where you could find damn
> near any structure you might want in it *someplace*, but then its not
> terribly clear how/if you bend that to fit what you actually need it
> for, instead of having to use what would have normally been generated
> anyway. I actually looked at this and thought, "Wow! Some color changes,
> quirks, like refraction, or other things, applied to one of those, would
> work a lot better for a project I have been thinking of." Only, about
> two seconds later I then thought, "Ok, but how do you make any of that
> stuff "grow" into similar sized, space constrained, forms, which
> actually *can* be used for what I have planned?"

These are precisely the reasons I like these systems; it's hard to 
predict what can happen :)

> Frankly, I am no where near good enough to even guess how to do that. lol

Sometimes exploration will let you stumble across a structure you had 
intended. Other times, you need a system suited for what you are doing. 
For instance, cellular automata can be "grown" from a substrate, and 
bounds can be made for it, but the end result is still something 
unintended. Fairly recently someone invented a snowflake generator which 
produces what appears to be physically-accurate results. Really cool, 
but it takes days to grow the things :(

Sam

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