Mind Map
When the word ‘loops’ first came to my mind, I thought about the repeat complex pattern in nature. The pattern of stones and plants etc.
I did preliminary research and found some topics I’m interested in.
I think the shape of fractal is interesting, so I choose fractal as a node and did secondary research to learn different types of fractals.
Idea Generation and Testing
I generated some 2d fractals using Chaotica at first and made some animations.
However, I think generate fractals in 3D is a better idea, since I can play around with different shaders in 3D software. I finally decided to generate a Mandelbulb.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbulb
According to wikipedia, the Mandelbulb is a three-dimensional fractal, constructed by Daniel White and Paul Nylander using spherical coordinates in 2009.
I used a Maya Arnold stand-in plugin to generate the Mandelbulb. I found out that the Mandelbulb was composed with round dots and I could only apply surface shader using Maya with this stand-in plugin.
I switched to Blender on the half way because I found out that I could use volume shader in Blender to create a airy Mandelbulb.
Process
I created the shader using nodes in Blender. There are math nodes in Blender that allows me to create different types of fractals using different formula.
I added a ColorRamp node to color the Mandelbulb. I made it black, red and white to give it a lively cell-like appearance.
The background music is ‘Mind Virus’. I found it on the website ‘Epidemic Sound’.
Final Outcome
The final outcome is a 50 second video showing the change of a Mandelbulb. The value of n shifts between 2-20.