"L'animation nous offre surtout une ambiance exceptionnelle, digne d'un Prometheus. Le résultat est tout simplement fabuleux."
LIDD.FR
The principles of Fractal Engineering would obviously work on any planet. by Julius Horsthuis music: "Bouwput" by Maurice Horsthuis
Background
After playing around with the parameters from 'the Resolution of the Thirteen Fractal Skulls' i found a cool way to break the radial symmetry that it had, by re-arranging the order of the functions. Breaking this symmetry created this wonderful curved mountainous arena, and I set out to try to recreate a shot from the movie Prometheus - in which the titular engineers are some sort of alien race.
The shot had a lot of atmospherics in it, and this is something mandelbulb3d cannot do, so i had to use some other tricks. First, I rendered the animation with all the morphing geometry, but i also rendered a pass with the same camera motion but no morphs, in order to track this using boujou. This was possible because this fractal renders relatively fast.
When the camera motion was tracked, I simulated some smoke in FumeFX and rendered it using the camera. When I composited it in After Effects, it got the deep atmospheric look i was after.
I was quite lucky with the way the whole thing animated, ships flying away and all.
The only disappointment i had was when i saw the final render of the ending, in which the mountains where extremely jagged and fake. looking, something I couldn't tell from the preview render. I tried to hide this with the atmospherics and lens flares.
My father, Maurice Horsthuis who is a composer had suggested that I use his piece 'bouwput' for one of my fractals, and it seemed a perfect fit for this one.