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Index › Discussion › Exhibition › Animated 3D curlicue fractal
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Animated 3D curlicue fractal (Read 2044 times)
Oolong
Animated 3D curlicue fractal
Sep 26th, 2006, 8:52pm  
I've been having fun coding up a Processing version of the animated Curlicue Fractal, which has seen previous incarnations in C++ with OpenGL, Java and (thanks to Marijke van Gans) machine code... and Brevity and POCO, come to think of it.

Each version has its advantages and disadvantages. I'm personally delighted by the near-total lack of explicit maths in this one - instead, it simply stacks up squares, each one rotated more with respect to the last. I love that such a potentially complex fractal can be made so simply. Hope you enjoy it! There's a gallery here if anyone's interested. Naturally though, stills don't do it justice.

There's lots to do yet, but I'm busy so I probably won't do it for a little while.
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« Last Edit: Jan 22nd, 2007, 4:51pm by Oolong »  
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Oolong
Re: Animated 3D curlicue fractal
Reply #1 - Nov 22nd, 2006, 12:38am  
If anyone's interested, I've made some substantial improvements - changing the length and speed, altering the transparency, etc...

Most important for me is that I've added text input so that you can enter seed numbers (whether as digits or as the irrational numbers e, pi and phi). That's particularly interesting because there is a general shape of curlicue for every number between zero and one, and its form depends on the arithmetic properties of the number - I believe it's only technically a fractal with irrational numbers, while for rational numbers the complexity of the pattern depends on how simply it can be expressed as a fraction.

I've implemented the text input as JavaScript, in the absence of a native way to do it in Processing. In many ways this works rather nicely, although the user interaction is not quite as neat as I'd like, mainly because I'm pretty new at JS (I'd like it to input the number when you press enter, and return the focus to the applet, but I haven't figured out how yet).

Hope you enjoy it!
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bioscribble
Re: Animated 3D curlicue fractal
Reply #2 - Dec 3rd, 2006, 6:56pm  
I like playing with the animated version of the fractal, although it took me a few clicks to figure out which link went there. Reminds me a bit of how Napier constructs his images over at potatoland.org--a spinning/vibrating 3-D form with accumulating iterations. Maybe some tweaks to the color scheme would yield beautiful, printable work.
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Oolong
Re: Animated 3D curlicue fractal
Reply #3 - Dec 4th, 2006, 11:45pm  
Thank you! Yeah, there are several different approaches I might take to colouring - what I'm using now is about the simplest algorithm I've come up with, but I might add some more options there soon. The 3D OpenGL executable version has quite different colouring. It could be fun to make some high-resolution printable works...
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