"Fractals of Incidence sees his signature slow-moving, cinematic long-shots of animated fractals in a deep blue landscape of melting, morphing ice."
- THE CREATORS PROJECT
a _CelticMode, an Amazing-Box-Smooth-Fold and a rotate C. Simple mathematics define the forms of the frozen netherworld. Incidental reflections and refractions do the rest. The music is of a soundtrack by the amazing Eric Serra from the Luc Besson movie Atlantis. (from the early nineties)
Background
This is my first piece where the entire Fractal is transparent. Transparency is something that Mandelbulb3D doesn't handle easily. The ray-traced refractions are prone to a lot of noise and therefor extremely slow to render. Also, because fractal geometry usually doesn't consist of solids, but is made up of layers, like an onion. All this endless detail makes it almost impossible to get a good solid look. Some fractals however, like this one, is pretty solid and therefor a good candidate for some icy or glassy renders.
Also, I toyed a little with some light absorption settings, which yielded a faux SSS look. I rendered non-antialiased on 4K and a denoise filter in After Effects before scaling down to 2K. That worked surprisingly well, and might be a great idea to use in general for the future. Rendering non-antialiased in 4K also ensures that the Z-buffer is clean, and this reduces artifacts when applying Depth of Field as well.