Like in a dream - 3D fractal trip

Fractal animation made with Mandelbulb3D. I originally designed it for Bryan Alvarez from UC Berkeley, for a TEDx talk about his Human Atlas project, to illustrate his initial dream about the beauty of living systems, hence the name of the video. This particular fractal a hybrid Julia set where many parameters are being animated: the fractal paramaters themselves, the Julia seed, the colors, and of course the camera position. One could say it's not 3D, but many-many-D!

Music courtesy of Zzzzra - Pneuma - filtre lent.

[shiinondogewalker]

Yeaah, no my dreams are not even close to be this detailed.. I dream in 144p

[joshua_]

Don't know what your dream is like, but mine's definitely not like this

[lmartinson]

Hey! This is that thing that plays on my eyelids when I rub my eyes really hard!

[theguyfromsomewhere]

Big respect to an operator for filming this for us.

[magicpug]

When you drink the stuff in the lava lamp

[Zantigableiaust]

It is that strange dream when you have a high fever as a child..

And sometime when fall asleep just before lost consciousness I feel like I have seen this before..

[HECKproductions]

i love how it alters between organc and mechanic looking stuff

[roilen]

Some have pointed out in the comments that this feels "familiar". The reason could be that fractals are as close as we can get to imitating organic shapes with math. Anyone interested in the subject should read Mandelbrot's (father of fractals) "The Fractal Geometry of Nature".

He points out that if you wanted to define the shape of a tree or a cloud or a coastline, there are no euclidean primitives (squares, triangles, cubes, etc) that do it any justice at all. However, with fractals, you can come MUCH closer. Think of a tree. It starts from one line (the trunk), which then splits into branches. Those branches then split into more branches, and so on. We all know that a tree is not a triangle or a circle on top of a rectangle, it is a series of branches and leaves. Fractals might just be the underlying math for how organic shapes are defined in our universe. I can't do it much justice here and I'm still a novice on the subject, but that might be the reason for the feelings of familiarity.

[DialthebarSoap]

4 years old me lost in the clothing department

[merchantat]

id love to see the math behind these visualizations. Having the creator talk through his understanding of each parameter and how it effects the visual outcome would be very satisfying

[SomeBlokeOrWhatever]

So this is what being on math feels like.

[zablingus]

When you take 3 vitamin gummies when the bottle says take 2

[SpadeFuryOfficial]

the type of shit i’d be seeing as a kid when i try so hard to fall asleep that the little particle things in my closed eyes start moving

[adfhgadfsgasdf]

cant believe this was 10 years ago, amazing graphics

[frasermcarthur]

This is where the Flying Dutchman sent squidward

[iyde]

If this is what dreams look like then I think I’m doing something wrong

[grannps]

I enjoyed this much more when I focused on the empty space instead of the changing shapes. It gave the image the illusion of enormous vastness

[ekalic]

This is so good, that it is even scary for me. It feels like being trapped somewhere, and unable to get out.

[thealienontheinternet]

I can't stop seeing Eiffel Towers everywhere

[lifeisbetterwhenyourelax]

I think what makes this so hyper-real is the fact that it's not just zooming but self-transforming. Everything is constantly transforming, from the macro scale down to the micro scale.