A Fractal Museum tour through Holland's biggest treasures: The polders, the agricultural history, Delftware, but also the capital and the famous Kingsday celebrations. (all fractal, ofcourse.) by Julius Horsthuis 2015 music: "Onderdoor" by Maurice Horsthuis
Background
This silly short started with two ideas. One was the soundtrack that my father, Maurice Horsthuis, wrote for a documentary about Holland's most famous museum, 'het nieuwe Rijksmuseum'.
The second was a technique I wanted to try to create Fresnel reflections on something like a China plate. In real life, everything except metal is more reflective at grazing angles then at straight angles. (Look straight into a window and you barely see your own reflection, but if you look into the glass from an angle it seems to turn into a mirror) Most CG renders such as Vray that I often use have this type of reflection built-in. Unfortunately, Mandelbulb3D has no such function, and when it does reflections, it does them uniformly across the surface. This is why most pieces rendered with reflections look metallic- metal has no Fresnel reflections. - Like in 'the hard problem of Consciousness'
In order to fake Fresnel reflections I wanted to render two passes, one with and one without reflections. Then blend between them using a special Normal pass that I made. In the end, it didn't look good on the two Delft Blue pieces here, because the surfaces are too detailed and not smooth enough.
When I had the idea of the Delft Blue and the Museum tour, I started thinking how I could visualize other aspects of Dutch culture with fractals. Some are a bit far-fetched, but it was a fun exercise nonetheless.
