3D Fractal Exploration

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

lovely stuff richard,
quick question......r those lens effects you have in your images created by DOF Pro??? or some other app?

thanks

best regards

[Sazzle74]

I have no idea what you said (other than the word 'fractal')

My sentiments exactly but they're beautiful - can you explain a bit more how you did this? Thanks

[olitech]

Absolutely delicious!!

Richard...you have some splainin' to do...

[sea2stars]

Beautiful!

Has anyone ever played with XenoDream?

[alias_marks]

Hey Richard, those are quite interesting and I to would be interested in a more in depth look at how those were created too. Quite beautiful

Artistically, my gut reaction is that some of the edges are too 'sharp' and try to show too much detail. I almost want some of the edges to soften up a bit, something with the ailaising. It's kinda like I want to believe that these are realistic sculputures and the sharpy-ness take me out of the experience. my 2c

M-

[richard_rosenman]

Hey guys;

Glad you like them - I do too. Well, aside from the short explanation on the website, there's not that much to it.

I mean, there's literally hundreds of 3D fractal generation programs out there and as long as they can export to OBJ, you're pretty much set. A lot of them do. I did find that some had pretty lousy OBJ export algorithms while others had much better ones. Some also tend to have mesh optimization algorithms too but when I used this, it destroyed the mesh. Finally, almost all of them seem to produce normal errors - to such a degree that simply inverting or unifying them did not help. This was where the VRay 2-sided material really came in handy as it was able to render messed up normals.

Everyone's been asking about the software. I used Julia4D (open source) and a couple of applications I purchased from Terry at Mystic Fractal (commercial). Terry has a good variety of them that each produce different types of fractals but most important of all, they also feature a great OBJ exporter.

The process is fairly straight forward and involves what you would expect:

1 - Generate fractal in 3rd part app
2 - Export OBJ mesh w/ best settings your system will handle before melting
3 - Import into your fav 3D app
4 - Render & comp

One of the coolest things about 3D fractals is that the meshes are generated with a mesh resolution. This is usually called a step size and the smaller it is, the more detailed and refined your mesh will be. Picture if your object was made up of of tiny boxes of space. This is where a power system really shines through. Many of these fractals have so much more detail that could not be exported due to the physical size of the mesh. If your step size is too high, the 3D mesh starts getting jagged - you can see this in some of the object curves.

One big problem I kept having was crashing because some of these objects are literally several million polys each. So getting them into Max was a pain, as was rendering them. I wish I had done this on a 64 bit system instead. In the end, I managed to get each one rendered without having to resort to VRay proxys and other tricks. Occasionally, I did some mesh optimization in 3dsmax to bring down the poly count a bit.

Once they're rendered in layers, everything happens in Photoshop. And I do mean everything. These days, I'm doing about 30% of the final output in 3D and 70% in comp. So you can imagine that all the color grading, post effects, etc. were all done in Photoshop.
This was a long process and each fractal would take about 4-5 days to piece together. All the optical effects such as flares, glows, etc, are hand-made in Photoshop.

The DOF was mainly 3D with the exception of one or two in which DOF PRO was used. Since the DOF rendered fairly quickly, there was no need to use DOF PRO like in many other instances.

Overall, it was a great project and I learned a hell of a lot about fractals, as well as the process of generating them. Altering one variable out of twenty can drastically change the form of the object - so if you get something you like, save the algorithm!

Oh, and my favorite is that last one too. It's the strangest and most chaotic form of the set. This one is particularly interesting because the falloff shader really adds an interesting look to it.

-Richard

[m_hinks]

Thats a great explaination Richard.

Im left with only one other question! Can you do a break down going from the final Vray render, through a few key stages of post, to the final image?

Like you, I like to use the post stage to really maximise the images potential. But I do still try to get 80/90% there in the render. A bit old school I know! I think it would be a great benifit to all of us here to see what sort of render elements you use, and how they can generate such good results.

Looking forward to you next work.

Mark

[stevesideas]

Cool. I think I may try some of those myself.

..and good god man...are you trying to break the record of most websites launched in a 5 year period ?

[richard_rosenman]

lol!

Regarding the process, I have a better idea. I'll post the base layers I brought into Photoshop so that you can see the before and after.

I'm in mid travel right now but I'll post that as soon as I get home. It's a good example cause it shows just how much of the work I do in Photoshop vs. 3D.

-Richard

[richard_rosenman]

Hey guys;

I was about to post a new project tonight and BOOM - my power supply blew. But I remembered I was going to add an image to this thread so here it is.

This is what I was talking about: the base fg image, base bg image and the final after Photoshop processing. These are the only two layers I start with in Photoshop, and the rest is done entirely in the comp with 2D textures from the web.



-Richard

[judderman]

My sentiments exactly but they're beautiful - can you explain a bit more how you did this? Thanks

lol, glad I wasn't the only one thinking this - the original post was a bit over most of our heads I suspect, major wiki-ing needed.