Fractal eXtreme: Exploring the Mandelbrot set and Changing Colours

Ok, from here on out, I'm going to keep the maths down to a minimum :)

For the past few days, I've been playing around with Fractal eXtreme, often getting lost for hours within its beautiful depths. Now it's time to share with you all that I've learnt about it and the Mandelbrot set.

First, for all who have landed on this post first, and don't wish to go back and read all the maths explanations, here's what the Mandelbrot set looks like in Fractal eXtreme:

Really beautiful colour variations, no? And it's very easy to play around with the colours: Just go to Options > Colour Mapping, or Colour Palette.



Colour Mapping is for big, general changes. You'll see that changing the 'offset' is most effective, and adjusting the 'speed' can make things very interesting within a certain range.



Colour Palette is for finer tuning and is a lot of fun to play with. There are also a few presets to choose from. By oscillating between Colour mapping and Palette, you can yield several great variants of one single area. What's also nice is that if you're in a particularly beautiful or interesting region, but need to leave/close the program for some reason, you can simply save it. Fractal eXtreme has it's own format, .fx, so you can come back to the region whenever you want by simply opening the file.

Here are a few examples of my own adventures with colour tinkering, in two different regions of the Mandelbrot set (click to enlarge):

 

If I wasn't so tired, I would add a few more (though fear not, I'll soon create a page for all the many beautiful ones I intend to create).

The other thing is, you may have noticed by now that even though the Mandelbrot set goes on forever, no matter where you zoom, some areas are less interesting than other. Some areas tend to look the same, cycle after cycle, with the colours simply changing.

But then there are places where it seems as though everything changes all the time. I'll leave it up to you, for now, to discover your favourite spots.

But just to show you, here are two zoom videos, to show you the location of my above two examples. Hope you like them:

 

 

And that will have to conclude this post for now. Next post, all about other kinds of Mandelbrots ;)