Applications of Fractals   

Special Effects

Computer graphics has been one of the earliest applications of fractals. Indeed, fractals can achieve realism, beauty, and require very small storage space because of easy compression. Very beautiful fractal landscapes were published as far back as in Mandelbrot’s Fractal Geometry of Nature. Although the first algorithms and ideas are owed to the discoverer of fractals himself, the artistic field of using fractals was started by Richard Voss, who generated the landscapes for Mandelbrot’s book. This sparked the imagination of many artists and producers of science fiction movies. A little later, Loren Carpenter generated a computer movie of a flight over a fractal landscape. He was immediately hired by Pixar, the computer graphics division of Lucasfilms. Fractals were used in the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, to generate the landscape of the Genesis planet and also in Return of the Jedi to create the geography of the moons of Endor and the Death Star outline. The success of fractal special effects in these movies lead to making fractals very popular. Today, numerous software allows anyone who only knows some information about computer graphics and fractals to create such art. For example, we ourselves were able to generate all landscapes throughout this website, such as the one below.