Turning the cogs

Flame fractals are even less “designed” than the more traditional fractals based on complex equations. There you tend to start with a fixed formula that you know looks good, and then find a nice region to render. With flames you normally just look through randomly generated starting points, sometimes ten, sometimes maybe even a hundred until you find one that looks good enough to investigate further. Then you tinker with the parameters, a nudge here, a colour change there, iteratively making it “better”. Sometimes of course one of the random images looks absolutely great and no amount of changing will improve it.

One thought on “Turning the cogs”

  1. This is the post I’ll use from now on to prove that math can be art. Most people will buy Bach as a good example in music, but I’ve never been able to find a convincing explanation in visual media. Nice!

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