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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Curious how the animated fractals look? Here are some examples of the raw visuals that our rendering farm produced.
