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It gives me warm fuzzies being surrounded by fellow Mandelbrot lovers on this thread. I've been enchanted by fractals ever since seeing IFS ferns that someone made in BASIC on a green monochrome screen.

I've wanted for a long time to get around to generating the Mandelbrot as a 3D height map (Fractint could do that from a static viewpoint), and make it explorable. Ideally where you can change size to explore it all...

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That sounds like a cool idea. Do you mean the height would be based on color with the blackness being either a deep point or a high plateau?

Yeah, pretty much, though really the colors are based on how long it takes a point to "escape" the set, if it does, with the blackness being ones that never do (to whatever level of diligence you have time to compute "never"). I was thinking the center black bug would be a deep crevasse or the "floor", with mountains rising on either side, so you could wander around in the canyons around a giant flat lowland, surrounded by mountain ridges.

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