Double-Fractal Kaleidoscope Animation Made with MathPaint

Here’s a one-minute animation send two shifting fractals through and angle-changing kaleidoscope Core Image filter, made with MathPaint:


The original fractal was a particular area of warped Julia Set, with the lowest color in the color mapping set to transparency (at iteration level 10). This transparency permits the layer to be duplicated and rotated 180 degrees with a Transform object. Slight changes were made to the duplicate layer to avoid perfect symmetry, resulting in this base image:

Note that the document has a white background, so those white bands are actually the transparency of the lower layer.

A kaleidoscope effect is applied, with the angle shifted all the way to the left (to permit animation by small increase):

The animation includes several gradual change operations – the effect input angle, the i part of both fractal C parameters, a slow zoom-in on both fractals, a vertical shift of the foremost layer and a horizontal shift of the back layer.

The animation took awhile due to the pixel-by-pixel recalculation and re-rendering for both fractal layers of every frame. In general, animations of CoreImage effects changes and line-drawn layer types is quite fast, while field-based renderers like fractals and scalar fields need a little more time for each frame.

Learn more about MathPaint at this link.