A whole world in a formula
Fractal formulas are short yet extremely powerful. Half a page of code contains a whole world, including all the amazing tiny details of an almost bottomless microcosm.
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But, you never know what you get when you dive into one of those fractal spaces. Their behaviour can be rather chaotic - or stunningly beautiful.
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So how are those pictures and movies created?
Each of the Mirage videos started with a set of fractal formulas. We tested several hundred formulas until we had identified a selection that created interesting visuals.
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As a next step we generated a series of still images which were then animated in a separate piece of software.
One second of video consists of 25 individual frames, a complex frame might take up to 30 minutes of rendering time. Which means 2 seconds of video in 24 hours...
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That's why we used a rendering farm of laptops which were working day and night for 18 months to create the basic visuals of The Mirage Project.
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Curious how the animated fractals look? Here are some examples of the raw visuals that our rendering farm produced.
