hizlik-LookingOutwards03

Click here to check out the website!

This project, Aurulia by Tom Beddard, and the technology he uses, is amazing! Like I mentioned in my LookingOutwards02 assignment, I love large-scale, 3d cityscapes and renderings, so when I saw a thumbnail that look looked like a city, I immediately clicked on it but was blown away once I started reading into it. Tom interprets Mandalay’s fractal formula in this cityscape way, somehow creating these scenes that don’t quite look repetitive like fractal algorithms generally look like. I absolutely love the detail in it, the realism yet abstraction of this impossible cityscape, and the fact that it was algorithmically generated. I am quite speechless really. The flowing streets and interesting outcropping of buildings, odd round “holes” or “dents” in the mass of flat buildings that almost create a “floor” like Coruscant from Star Wars… it’s all mesmerizing.

I do not know much about Mandalay’s fractal formula, but I do know what fractals are and how they’ve been used for 2D artworks and designs. I have never seen them in 3D before, and this video included in the site also blew me away with how easy it is to create them! It’s almost like cheating, like i could use any screenshot as an artwork but it looks like it actually had very minimal effort to create it. This project has a nice balance between order and disorder- it looks, feels and acts like a real city, but it’s actually created using the randomnes, disorderness yet orderliness of a fractal formula. Like I mentioned above, he managed to break away from the orderly repetitiveness of a fractal formula to create this somewhat organic and varying landscape.