Jan 25 2010
Thoughts about Fractal Animation
There was a recent discussion on OT about fractal animation that I found interesting. Unfortunately, I don’t get along too well with the writers of that blog, so I will put my thoughts here.
I found it intriguing that they would conclude that an animated fractal is less interesting than a still fractal. You would think that it would be the other way around. Movement is always more interesting than non-movement. When something moves in a scene, it catches our attention, so why would a moving image be less interesting than a still one?
I think that it has a lot to do with the fractal that is being animated. Animation is nothing more than a series of rendered still images. Coming up with a fractal movie that has any substantial content requires a tremendous amount of rendering. Most of us don’t have the patients to wait around for days or even weeks for our computers to spit out an animation, so we start with simple and boring fractals that will render faster. A boring fractal is a boring fractal, moving or not. But that’s not the real problem.
When it comes to animation, we have high expectations. The movie Avatar is animated digital art. I saw the 3D IMAX version of it twice. The second time was just as visually stunning to me as the first. How can an animated fractal compete with that? When I walked out of that movie, I found myself wondering how any fractal art could compete with that, but that’s another topic.