Buddhabrot fractal method

I was later pleased to learn that a computer artist named Lori Gardi, who I had described this technique to several years ago, has since devoted a great deal of her creative effort to generating various high-resolution images using the technique. She named it Buddhabrot which is a name I instantly loved and have adopted. Lori's web site contains some reduced examples of her work along with her writings into the mystical connections she's made between the Mandelbrot set and Buddhism.

The above image shows the overall entire Buddhabrot object. To produce the image only requires some very simple modifications to the traditional mandelbrot rendering technique: Instead of selecting initial points on the real-complex plane one for each pixel, initial points are selected randomly from the image region. Then, each initial point is iterated using the standard mandelbrot function in order to test whether it escapes or not. Only those that do exit are then re-iterated. (The ones that don't escape - I.E. which are believed to be within the Mandelbrot Set - are ignored). During re-iteration, I do not color a pixel according to the number of iterations used, but instead, I increase a count field for each pixel that it lands on before exiting. Every so often, the current array of "hit counts" is output as an image. Eventually, successive images barely differ from each other, ultimately converging on the one above. I'm the most unreligious person you could ever meet, but it's hard not to think of this image as revealing god hiding in the Mandelbrot Set and proving that the Hindus were right all along.

This is a 4x magnification of the top of the "head" region of the first image. At the very center of this image is the bright area from the forehead region which Lori calls the "Third Eye". It's interesting to note the heart shaped feature directly below it. It's also interesting to note that the overall look of this close-up looks very much like the unmagnified image, which is a common feature in fractal images.

This image is an extreme close-up of the third eye area using yet another 4x magnification. It was very tricky to generate this image because it's not possible to zoom arbitrarily deeply into the Buddhabrot set as it is with the mandelbrot set. The technique used to create this image was somewhat like clipping out a section from a much larger image. It's interesting to note that none of the features in this image are associated with features in the same region of the underlying mandelbrot set. The entire image area is actually completely contained within the main black area of the mandelbrot set. That's why there is not a mandelbrot image of this region linked to this image: It would be completely black. Instead, clicking on this image will take you to an even higher resolution version of the same image which took an entire long weekend to generate. For those familiar with the mandelbrot technique, the size of the image region is 0.125 units, and the coordinates of the image center is (-1.15, 0.0).

This image is a close-up Buddhabrot version of one of the tiny "mini-mandel" regions floating directly above the head of the main image. You can see those spots in the high-resolution image linked above. I've not bothered to link a related underlying mandelbrot image to this one since it is almost exactly identical to the first mandelbrot image. You can easily see substantial differences in the Buddhabrot version however.

This rather unsymetric image is also a Buddhabrot version of one of the tiny isolated mini-mandel islands. This one is floating well off one shoulder of the main figure. It is located at (-1.25275, -0.343) and is only .0025 units in size which is only about one percent the scale of the main figure.

After a long time generating greyscale images I realized that there is a natural way to use color to display more information within the Buddhabrot images. Notice that basic Buddhabrot images are generated by choosing a "maximum iterations" threshold just as for Mandelbrot images. One main difference between the two techniques is that Buddhabrot images have distinctly different appearances depending on the choice of threshold, whereas the effect of different threshold values for mandelbrot images only changes the amount of black (unresolved) pixels. I realized that I should be able to generate meaningful color Buddhabrot images by generating three basic images that differ only in the choice of threshold values, and then combining those images as the red, green, and blue channels of a single color image. This is exactly the same technique that astronomers use when generating "false-color" images of astronomical objects. For example, see the famous Eagle Nebula images from the Hubble Space Telescope and read the associated descriptions of color astronomomical mages. For my color Buddhabrot images the three different threshold values are analogous to the different frequencies of light which NASA combined into their beautiful false-color images. For the image below I used threshold values of 500, 5000, and 50000, and assigned them to the blue, green, and red channels respectively in order to generate images that most resemble the NASA nebula images.

After some years I realized how to unify all the Mandel/Julia/Buddhabrot objects and techniques. Click the following link to learn about this interesting extension called the Buddhabrot Hologram.

Still later while exploring different ways to sample and project these sorts of images, one really surprising thing happened: In one particular rendering projected onto one of the six major planes an image of the logistic map simply popped out! (There are 6 major planes in 4D just like the 3 in 3D.)

Finally, below is a single frame part way through a run generating a low-resolution view of the main figure. Just for fun, I also compiled a set of those frames into an animated GIF file which you can view to see how the image converges over time. Clicking on the image will bring you that animated GIF, but beware since it is over three megabytes which will take a very long time to download completely unless you have a fast internet connection. With a 28.8K modem this will be around 30 minutes. the good news is that you can start watching the animation as it streams across the net to you. Once it's fully downloaded, it will loop quickly through the frames and you can watch the Buddha come swimming out of the void. The complete animation took around half an hour to generate on a P233 Laptop PC.

The Buddhabrot Technique