Mind-Bending 3D Mandelbulb Fractals by Daniel White

Here’s a set of stunning 3D Mandelbulb Fractals by Daniel White from Skytopia, a site dedicated to fractal imagery. A fractal is a “type of shape that yields (sometimes elaborate) detail forever, no matter how far you ‘zoom’ into it”. As can be seen, some amazing imagery can be built using this medium…

3D Mandelbulb Fractals Gallery

Above: A Slice of Mandelbrot Gateaux

Above: Christmas Coral Egg Fractal

Above: Shell Life Med

Above: Pow2-YZ Besthope 3D Mandelbulb Fractal

Above: Mandelbulb Fractal

Above: Blue & Green Mandelbulb Fractal

Credits: All 3D Mandelbulb Fractals images in this set are copyright © Daniel White.

★★★★★ For More Inspiration, check out Fluorescent Water by Mark Mawson.

This is a quote from the Skytopia site:

Opening Pandora’s Box For the Second Time: Our story starts with a guy named Rudy Rucker, an American mathematician, computer scientist and science fiction author (and in fact one of the founders of the cyberpunk science-fiction movement). Around 20 years ago, along with other approaches, he first imagined the concept behind the potential 3D Mandelbulb (barring a small mistake in the formula, which nevertheless still can produce very interesting results – see later), and also wrote a short story about the 3D Mandelbrot in 1987 entitled “As Above, So Below” (also see his blog entry and notebook).

Back then of course, the hardware was barely up to the task of rendering the 2D Mandelbrot, let alone the 3D version – which would require billions of calculations to see the results, making research in the area a painstaking process to say the least [read more].