Read Issue 65 of Digital Art Live

“Welcome to our new ‘Fractals’ issue, about fractals, fractal software, and the artists who love to make fractal art. Fractals are great! Who knew that advanced maths could be such fun? Not me, back when I was a boy aged ten and was striving to solve my classroom sums. Maths was not fun then, the teacher was a bully, and I was never very good at fractions anyway. If you had told me then that in the future I would enjoy manipulating highly complex mathematical equations, via an interactive Etch-a-Sketch displayed on a TV screen… then my young mind would have been boggled. Yet here we are in 2022, and fractals can now spawn vast sci-fi space stations like something from a Chris Foss painting. Or find strange steampunk shapes lurking in endless Byzantine hallways. Or envision alien plants growing beside pools drawn from the weird imagination of H.P. Lovecraft. Not to mention the striking 2D graphic designs that are also possible, and can range in their style from eye-searing psychedelic patterns down to something that approaches the subtlest of ‘minimalist’ designs. All these and more are at your fingertips, once you have some good fractal software, a bit of training and a few starting formulas.” (Editorial excerpt written by David Haden )

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Inside this issue

JULIUS HORSTHUIS Julius is an acclaimed artist who works big. He renders for public ‘fulldome’ projection domes, on his 236-thread render farm! MB3D | AFTER EFFECTS “My exhibition ‘Geometric Properties’ in New York City has been an enormous success. More than 100,000 people have visited the immersive gallery. From the kind of feedback I get, for some people these fractals can be quite transformative experiences” PAOLO OLIVARI GUERRA Paulo lives and works in Chile. He hand-crafts his fractal-like pictures and animations in Blender‘s real-time Eevee engine. BLENDER | EEVEE “… I love the combination of organic forms and hard forms. I don’t know … that combination is called ‘biomechanics’? I love it. Maybe that‘s why the shapes that I usually occupy myself with are pointed curves, and maybe the tribal ones are still in my brain.” ‘BATJORGE‘ Fractal maker Batjorge, lives in the sunny Canary Islands, surrounded by fractal-like volcanic beaches and shells. MANDELBULBER | MB3D “Someone on Facebook took one of my fractals to be a new species of coral found on the Galapagos Islands. That picture went viral over 18 months, and has been shared millions of times. I was certainly surprised when I saw it was being wildly reposted everywhere.”

Also find inside…

• EDITORIAL
• FREE FRACTAL SOFTWARE REVIEW
• G’MIC 3.0
• BACK ISSUES
• CONTESTS
• INTERVIEW: MARIJE BERTING
• GALLERY
• IMAGINARIUM

Excerpt from our interview with Julius Horsthuis

DAL: Julius, welcome to Digital Art Live.

JH: Thank you for having me!

DAL: Ok, to begin… how did you begin your career in digital art? Did you go straight to trying fractal software, or was there some stage in between?

JH: I definitely didn’t start with fractal software. I didn’t even know what fractals were, back when I got started. I began my career in film and TV production. I worked for five years on film sets, assisting with lighting and cameras. After that I worked for many years in the digital media and VFX industry. Mostly with 3D Studio MAX, but also with a lot of After Effects compositing and editing.

DAL: I see. What then was your first encounter with fractal software, and what did you think of it back then?

JH: I think I saw my first 3D fractal animation around the year 2010. It must have been on YouTube. I was immediately fascinated by the unearthly beauty. I was developing a screenplay that I also wanted to direct. I was captured by the idea that those fractals had never been seen in cinema before, even though they were so perfect for it.

DAL: Indeed. And then you discovered Mandelbulb3D I think? What were your first impressions of the software, and how developed was it at that point in time?

JH: Yes, a colleague of mine pointed me in the direction of that software as one of the ways to create these worlds. This was circa 2013 and the software was in a more basic state than it is nowadays.

DAL: With the current May 2020 version, yes.

JH: It’s improved in the sense that we have faster CPUs to render the fractals on, such as the Threadripper.

DAL: Yes, it’s CPU based for rendering. Which doesn’t necessarily need the very latest CPUs. We reviewed the HP Z600 workstation a while back, which gives a budget hobbyist 24 threads on — if you get the right model — fast Intel Xeon CPUs and for only about £250 ($340) refurbished. The latest May 2020 version runs fine on that and you’re looking at about 12 minutes for a 4K render and a good non-grainy quality. But how did you find the UI, back then?

JH: As for the UI… my first impressions were immediately quite positive. Mandelbulb3D is not easy to get into and the interface is quite exotic. But I liked that a lot. It all seemed to make sense, but I was probably also really eager to learn it. I watched a few tutorials and quite quickly could create a look that looked pretty good. I kept learning new things almost every day, so in that respect it took a long time. But looking back it didn’t feel long, and I think I was able to produce my first film after a few weeks of tinkering with the software.

DAL: Yes, it’s a strange software in some respects. Even if you don’t learn it and just tinker and play you can still make very cool stuff with it. But obviously there’s so much more that can be done with it, and thus really anyone who enjoys it must understand that they need to learn it rather than just go on playing. But I believe you took it a step further, by adding it into Adobe After Effects?

JH: Yes, it wasn’t until I moved the first Mandelbulb3D renders to Adobe After Effects that I really saw the unrealized potential. As I said, I had done a lot of VFX. In my years of doing VFX work I have done a few feature films as VFX supervisor. To be clear, those were pretty low-budget films in a very small country. But I loved doing them. Working closely for a year with the director and cinematographer of this Dutch/Italian fantasy road movie, dreaming up locations, sets and solutions has been an extremely forming experience. The VR fractals project then started out as a little test — see what would happen if you rendered fractals in 360 degrees. It turned out to be such a powerful experience for anyone who tried. Even those who didn’t ‘enjoy fractals’ the normal way, they loved them when immersed. It is still the reason I think fractals are perfect for immersive art. I know a lot of people find the fractal software interfaces rather daunting but I was in a place where I was so fed up with 3D Studio Max that I was longing for something completely novel, and Mandelbulb3D gave me exactly that. I didn’t want to sculpt with polygons, I didn’t want to UV unwrap, and this completely new approach of 3D animation was exactly what I needed at the time