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Generating Fractals with Blender and Animation-Nodes
What: this is a collection of tutorials, examples and resources for generating fractals visuals using Blender. I’ll cover topics such as recursion, n-flakes, L-systems, Mandelbrot/Julia sets and derivations.
Why: if you are fascinated by fractals patterns, interested in procedural generation in Blender and want to get a better understanding and hands-on experience of animation-nodes and shader nodes.
Who: all content here is based on Blender 2.8.2 and animation-nodes v2.1. I also relied on a few short code snippets (Python ≥ 3.6).
Fractals
“beautifully intricate, yet so simple”
Fractals are shapes with fractal dimensions. This derives from the way we measure them as they scale. Theoretical fractals are infinitely self-similar across different scales.
For our setup, we are not concerned with pure theoretical fractals, as those are not achievable in Blender, unless under very specific circumstances. We mostly care about fine structure (details at different scales) and a natural appearance of self-similarity (made up of apparent smaller copies of itself).
Additional suggested resources to learn more about fractals:
