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This image was designed for the cover of the Art of Fractals Calendar by Universe Publishing. The complex object in the center is a DLA, or diffusion-limited aggregate, a ubiquitous shape in nature. Interstellar dust grains have this kind of shape; this image attempts to capture both the violence of a supernova explosion (in which all heavy elements are formed and disbursed into the universe), and the warm glow of a stellar nursery in which such interstellar dust coalesces to form planets and, according to current scientific theory, you and I.
This image appeared in the SIGGRAPH '93 Technical Slide Set and in a recent piece in the Why Files web site.
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"Fire Ball" is simply a test of a flame-like procedural texture applied to a sphere.
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Przemek Prusinkiewicz was at Yale for a semester around 1989. He was working on early versions of his structural models of trees, and getting started on his book "The Algortihmic Beauty of Plants." He encouraged me to make some images for that book. I wondered if it would greatly annoy him if I burned up some of his trees. So with the help of Craig Kolb I made this image. (In a more serious vein, Craig and I also made Medicine Lake which also includes one of Dr. P's trees.)
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By the time "The Algortihmic Beauty of Plants" went to press, Przemek was too far beyond the preliminary tree models you see in "Forest Fire" to include them in his book, so they didn't appear there (though "Medicine Lake" did). However, Computer Graphics World commissioned this version of "Forest Fire" to appear on the cover of their May 1990 issue.
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My vision of hellfire and brimstone -- the flame texture seen in "Fire Ball" and "Forest Fire" above, applied to a landscape. Though it's hard to discern, this image features an advanced multifractal terrain model. I consider this to be a preliminary sketch; more work is needed to complete this image.
What you see here is the full image; an inexplicably cropped version appears in "Textures and Rendering: A Procedural Approach".
