Fascinating

One thing that’s always fascinated me is fractals and how so many of them echo forms found everywhere in real life so I thought ‘how about making a 3D fractal sculpture?’.

The first thing is to find a fractal image I liked the look of so after a little playing around with https://math.hws.edu/eck/js/mandelbrot/MB.html I found a view that I liked and copied the image into Photoshop to create the layers Lightburn needs to create the laser project.

Make it 3D

As Mandelbrot fractals impart a sense of depth, each layer needs separating by colour, creating 21 or so layers, each of which is exported as a threshold black-and-white PNG. These PNGs are imported into Lightburn, traced and merged with a simple rectangular frame object across the layers.

The layers are then arranged to be cut from the material…

Then it’s just a matter of cutting, cleaning the edges and assembling in the correct order…