#deep zoom

animated fractal from SylvieTG Animations on Vimeo.

frame[000000-001799] from SylvieTG Animations on Vimeo.

prostheticknowledge:

Once again, I have run into one of my recurring frustrations with fractals: render time. The particular image that’s troubling me is the cheerful rainbow one I made in celebration of more kinds of marriage becoming legal. It looks just like a fractal, with stripes of bright colors and some curly bits.

The thing is, I wanted it to have hearts in it, and I wanted them to be an integral part of the fractal, rather than an applied coloring algorithm. I know that there are places in the Mandelbrot set that make heart shapes, and I know how to find them, because I spent most of a summer systematically learning the geography of the Mandelbrot, so that I could reliably find the base shapes I needed for a given image.

So the rainbow picture is a piece of the Mandelbrot set that makes curly heart shapes*, but to get there requires a fairly deep zoom.** Deep zooms mean lots of decimal places in the numbers, and if you have enough decimal places, eventually you need arbitrary precision, which is very, very slow. The small render I initially posted took overnight to calculate. The medium-sized render for prints took about two days, and the t-shirt-sized render says it’s going to need more than a week. Nearly ten days of continuous calculation, with all the processors I have available plus a few I can use over a network, just to make a picture that anyone would look at and say, “Yep, that sure is a rainbow fractal, all right.”

I can never decide if all the time spent over the years learning about fractals (so I can find what I want) and then rendering them (so I can see the pictures) counts as well-spent or wasted. It makes me feel like I might as well have used a bunch of my life learning to be a really sublimely skilled mime, or something. It doesn’t seem like something that’s ever likely to count for much, in the real world.

I assume this is Photosynth, but there's a lot more detail shown here than in the TED demo from a year or so ago. The video is 7 minutes long but definitely worth watching all the way through… if you're into that sort of thing. More info on “Photo Tourism” is available on the University of Washington's website.