Preserved Topic: fractal trees in illustrator?

sure, why not? i've already done a sierpinski's gasket ( http://is.lamefree.com/~drd/sierpinski-3d.gif ), so it's just a hop skip and a jump over to a tree (if you are familiar with fractals, that is =) without further ado,
http://is.lamefree.com/~drd/analog/tree1-fantasm.jpg

Registers 11 on the 1-10 coolness scale
<img border=0 align=absmiddle src="http://www.ozones.com/forum/biggrin.gif">

Gotta love Julian and Mandelbrot. I used to get lost in fractals for hours at a time. Great for graphics and 3d stuff. I saw a program once that did awesome trees, bushes, and flowers using fractals. I used to play a maze game that used a fractal algorithym to make the mazes. Just when you get used to the pattern, the pattern changes in a subtle way and really messes you up. Isn't someone trying to use fractals as a form of compression? I haven't heard too much about that one lately. Fractal shapes are being used for antennas in cellphones.

What was I talking about?

Oh, yeah. I'm with Steve on the coolness factor.

Well, the fractal trees you saw were probably generated by Lindenmayer (L) Systems. They are pretty cool in that they basically generate commands for a LOGO turtle (except it can be in 3d).

Fractal image compression exists, and it is quite powerful. There is an extremely high-end piece of software that saves nearly lossless image files at some crazy compression ratio using this technology. It's something like a $500 plug in for photoshop to use the file format.

If anyone wants to learn more about fractals I have oodles of great references.



*edit* : oh yea, http://is.lamefree.com/~drd/analog/tree1-fantasm2.jpg
is a slightly niftier version <img border=0 align=absmiddle src="http://www.ozones.com/forum/wink.gif">

[This message has been edited by analog (edited 21-09-2000).]