Mandelbulb 3D Mesh: A Fractal Menagerie

A Fractal Menagerie
Copyright © 2016, Tiffany McFarlane

Lately I have been trying to push the envelope of my artwork, while recognizing the full potential of the fractal generating program Mandelbulb 3D. I came across a method to export the fractals created in Mandelbulb 3d as a 3d mesh that can be further manipulated in other 3d programs, like Blender. With the ability to create a mesh directly from your fractal with a new module called "BulbTracer" in the latest version of Mandelbulb 3d, the process is even more user-friendly. Here is my current workflow:

Mandelbulb 3d for creating the fractal shapes and voxel stacks
Fiji for converting each voxel stack into an actual mesh, and exporting it as an .obj file
MeshLab for cleaning up the meshes (reducing polygon count, smoothing, etc.)
Blender for adding color, lighting and rendering the final image

All of these programs are available online and can be downloaded for free. The latest version of Mandelbulb 3d can be found here.