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2009-10-30 Spectra

2009-10-22 Machine drawings

2009-10-21 Fractal monochrome painting

2009-10-18 Spanish wetlands

2009-10-14 Another gigapixel image

2009-10-13 Running the numbers

2009-10-12 DLA by Andy Lomas

2009-10-11 Gigapixel image

2009-10-10 Stars from squares

2009-10-07 Fractal photography

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October 30th 2009

Spectra

Morgen Bell wrote a cool tutorial about how to create spectra and rainbows in Ultra Fractal. The basic idea is just to have three layers, one red, one green and one blue, which differ only slightly. I made two images exploring this technique. The first one is 20091028-1, where the spectra are boldy obvious...

20091028-1

In the second one, 20091029-1, the spectra appear in a more subtle way. The three layers have a slightly different magnification step. Recall that this parameter controls the relative size of the patterns to be piled. The largest pattern to be piled has the same size in each layer, but the smaller copies get have a slightly different scale, what make the colors appear. As a result, at large scales, the image looks black and white, while at small scale it appears brightly colored. The same phenomenon occurs on any TV or computer screen displaying desaturated colors. Yet here the effect is made even more interesting by the fact that the origin lies in the botton right corner. Near the origin the three layers almost coincide, so even after zooming, the picture still looks black and white. Moving to the top left corner, the small scale patterns will get shifted and therefore look colored. Near the top left corner, most of the copies of the pattern (except the largest ones) are appreciably shifted between the different layers, so the picture dispalys a rich palette. Try to travel from the bottom right corner to the top left corner, you should see an interesting diversity of patterns and colors along the way.

20091029-1. This is a brightly colored image (and not a plagiarism of Magritte).

Going very far from the origin (what you can't do with the zoomable image), will result in the second largest copy of the pattern to be noticeably shifted between the layers, so even at large scales, the image is brightly colored. Here is a part of the pattern approximately 1500 units to the north-east (taking as unit the length of a side of the original picture), at the same magnification.

A part of the landscape of 20091029-1 which does not appear in the zoomable picture above.