Do you know of any work with fractals that is used to make game assets?

Most people eventually give up on fractals because they find them to be repetitive.

Sorry, had to make that joke.

Haha. Thanks for the input.

Outerra uses fractals for terrain things and i have forgotten the name of an open source project ... proland ... ? yes

The game POLLEN used fractals for it's ending sequence. Felt like 2001 - Space Odyssey, very cool.

That Outerra looks amazing. It reminds me (or vice versa) of Rage 2.

JoeJ! Can you please post a link to the ending on YouTube?

Does anyone know how to calculate the dimension of a fractal?

Historically in the late 80's and early 90's many projects relied on fractals because they had tiny resource requirements up front. Many demoscene programs relied on fractals for long-running visuals.

These days there are many brushes for textures and many modeling program features that use fractals to generate interesting elements in game resources. Sometimes they appear as part of the textures used in plant foliage, or in feathers or fur or hide. Sometimes they make up part of the wood textures, or stone, or clouds in the sky. Sometimes they provide fine variation in reflection maps and surface normals, or assorted other visual effects. They aren't the same as a deep zoom on a Mandelbrot image, but they do provide visual distinctiveness in the finished assets.  

On 10/5/2019 at 6:48 AM, taby said:

Do you know of any work with fractals that is used to make game assets?

I'm kind of working on that now. I have my voxel planet generator but I'd like to put trees on it.  I'm not going for ultra realistic trees, however I don't want blocky trees either.  I'm targeting something like older game trees like you find in WoW.   The problem with voxels is, to get something reasonably detailed you need a fairly high voxel density, much higher than you need for terrain.  That takes a lot of memory.

My solution is to build a tree in a more cylindrical shape and then apply an hour glass morph to it.  where the roots fan out on the bottom and the branches on the top.  There will also be a different kind of morph for pine like trees. Since I'm using prism voxels I think it's a little more suited to trees to begin with than cube voxels.

The main goal is really to not have to place specific trees with a separate LOD system.  I'm implementing a system that lets me use the same set of voxels as the terrain, but apply multiple sets of functions do them in addition to an optional morph.  It will support the generation of up to 8 sets of meshes for the same set of voxels. Id like to be able to do a pretty dense jungle. Since the LOD is done on the voxel level it will also apply to the trees.   The tree generation functions will of course have to incorporate the terrain functions in order to avoid placing trees on water and steep terrain.  I'll also have to include some environment function over the planet to vary the type and density of trees. Anyway it's a work in progress...