There's some pretty cool fractal imagery in the gallery.

Can the math nodes be used to make fractal art? 

where to start?

Programs that make nothing but fractals actually work fairly good for that.

Laurie

the only fractal thingamajig i have is Corel photopaint.

oh yeah, i should check with the node cult.

Xenodream makes 3D fractals. Might wanna check it out and play with it a little bit.

Laurie

erm

what...? corel photopaint does fractals?

ok. we need to start over I think.... the stuff in the gallery's were made with dedicated Fractal programs. a list can be found here - http://www.dmoz.org/Science/Math/Chaos_and_Fractals/Software/ - not with programs like Photopaint (tho I think your thinking when it was called "fractal design" which was the name of the company, not it's function) or Poser which is a 3D posing and rendering app.

in theory, you could get Poser to render fractals, but you'd need Bagginsbill, 40 odd pots of coffee and about six months...... the same way in theory you could chop a fully grown oak tree down with a small handsaw.  this is a case of "right tool for the right job" and poser is not the right tool.

Lots of Hazelnut coffee on hand.  more snow is headed my way, some goof off time coming.

As the others are saying, I have no doubt you could do many, many fractal type things with Poser's material system, but unless you're a pretty good math head you're basically going to be asking someone like Bagginsbill "how do I do this one" for any that you want to do, with little room for experimentation on your own.  There are tons of apps that let you play with fractals in a huge variety of ways that will let you do a lot of "sandbox" stuff without requiring a math degree.

Apophysis is another very cool one, pretty popular.  Of the various fractal gallery pics here, probably 90% are either Xenodream or Apophysis.

i saw the directory with the .xml for the nodes.  input and output parameters.

Groboto is another nifty app, although not specifically a fractal generator it's worth a look.

Sure, the Firefly Engine can do abstract stuff using the fractal nodes; the caveat is that they're relative slow, and they're not recursive (meaning you can't plug the output of a node back into the input). Its not designed for speed or efficiency in fractal evaluation the way that applications that are only about fractals are, but that's part of the fun of it.

The place to start is with very simple hi resolution geometry (the high resolution sphere primitive is ideal), and plugging noise functions into the displacement map. That can give you some very complex 3D geometry out of very simple scenes.

You could also write Python scripts that create fractal geometry. There is already a "fractal terrain" example that comes with Python that could serve as a starting point.

something like the VBA editor.  when you type the dot it gives you a list of the properties, etc?

Python editor with intellisense is already in Poser 8 and Pro 2010.

Firefly has a very strong micropoly displacement engine, which means you can create very complex geometry out of a very simple primitive, and a procedural texture plugged into the displacement. In the image, note that the displaced geometry actually casts real shadows . . . so there are real polys being created on the fly at render time

Is better than trying to cook up custom fractal geometry, as that's very poly heavy, and not at all interactive (if you do fee like it, Groboto is a lot of fun, as already mentioned)

The other thing that's great about using a procedural texture to generate geometry at render time is that its dynamic-- you can always bump up the precison of the render to "get more geometry" without having to go model it.

You can also animate the texture, and get deforming geometry with a lot less hassle than trying to set up morphs.

it almost looks like a dandelion puff

Quote - it almost looks like a dandelion puff

Ah, almost, but those would require a lot more work in Poser. The problem is that you can't "branch" at the end of a displacement, the way the puffs do.

To do [i]that[/i] would require Python, you'd have to offset little star shapes from the surface of the sphere; it could be done with Python, but much easier in something that supports growth and branching, like Bryce or Vue's Trees.

As a Poser Python exercise, it would be a great exam question, actually . . .