Printing 3d Mandelbrot Fractals!
The traditional method of drawing fractals is to calculate a value for a particular point and colour it in - but with 3d printing, we want to be able to join these points together in a way that makes some kind of sense. In this video we look at ball pivoting to take a point cloud and convert it into a mesh object before slicing it and 3d printing.
This is coupled with the quaternion maths from the previous video to generate the point cloud in three dimensional space. The outputs are challenging to generate because it pushes the limit of what the meshing algorithms can do. In this, we use python code to produce a xyz file, Meshlab to process it before passing it into our slicer (Cura). There is no design step with fusion or blender or anything, it is programatically generated 3d prints.
The potential for this goes on - as long as you have a formula that you can use to generate your initial point cloud, you can use this as an alternative way to create objects which are conceptually hard to model using traditional tools.
All of infinity is contained within this, and there is a ton of optimisations that could be done.