"Watch real streets melt into a techno-futurist fractal dream"
-THE CREATORS PROJECT
Background
Fractal Nature is my first attempt to fuse the fractals with Photogrammetry, a technique that creates 3d models from photos. I took a camera and went around my city, Amsterdam to find buildings and places that I could take pictures of from various angles. When I had them turned to 3d models, I was able to extract a depth map from it using 3dsMAX. This depth map, Z-buffer or height map as it's sometimes called, can be used to extrude a surface in MB3D.
The extruded surface can in turn be used to boolean an existing fractal space, so that fractals are only drawn within the extruded space. Although this doesn't allow me to rotate around the objects in 360 degrees, it still offers plenty of room to move around.
The most difficult thing actually is to have the fractal space sufficiently dense so that the original shape still reads well. If too dense, it just looks like an old scanline render without any of the fractal detail. If not dense enough, the shape doesn't read and nobody sees it's a real model.
The thumbnail picture scene from this film is a woman, leaned against a wall playing with her cell phone. I asked model Adinda Blokker to pose in this way, and took pictures from all angles from her. Then I tried lots of different formulas, and this one was particularly interesting to me because of the strange alien shapes with a lot of holes, but the general 'humanoid' shape still came through.
I would like to do more posing humans in the future with this technique.