Description

Spyrofoam is an iterated system renderer. Its name is a play on the names "Spirograph" (TM Hasbro) and "Styrofoam" (TM Dow), due to its curvy shapes and rendering artifacts caused by filling volumes with small spheres. The resulting surfaces look sort of like magnified styrofoam beads.

Applets

Spyrofoam 300 x 300 fast pc recommended

Algorithm

The attractor used is a modified version of the Peter De Jong attractor. The PDJ equation was extended to three dimensions and replicated several times so that different coefficients of the equation occur with varying probabilities in much the same way that classical Iterated Function Systems (IFS) are processed.

The resulting three-dimensional surface is approximated by rendering each iterated point with an individual sphere. Color is assigned based on the change in direction between subsequent positions of the iterated points.

Gallery

It takes about a million or so spheres to adequately render most surfaces at high resolution. This takes a while. So here are a few that are ready for immediate viewing...

600x600 160k 600x600 162k 600x600 165k

600x600 139k 600x600 144k 600x600 89k