Cassandra & Luntik
Luntik Luntik
Hey Cassandra, I’ve been sketching this crazy rainbow fractal thing where every swirl looks like a jellyfish made of neon lights—want to see if we can crunch the numbers and actually make it pop on a screen?
Cassandra Cassandra
Sounds like a cool project! Do you have a particular fractal formula in mind—maybe something like a Mandelbrot or Julia set—and any color palette or neon effect specifications? If you send me the parameters, I can help you set up a quick script to generate the image and tweak the colors to get that jellyfish glow.
Luntik Luntik
I’m thinking a Julia set with the magic constant c = 0.285+0.01i, run it for 200 iterations, zoomed in so the pattern looks like a jellyfish tentacle, then map the iteration count to a neon rainbow palette—like bright magenta, electric blue, hot pink, and lime green—blended with a glow filter that boosts the edges, so it looks like the jellyfish is glowing from the inside. Then we can add a slight blur to give that soft, ethereal glow. Let’s code it!
Cassandra Cassandra
Here’s a quick outline you can drop into a Jupyter cell or a script. ```python import numpy as np import matplotlib.pyplot as plt from scipy.ndimage import gaussian_filter, sobel # grid res = 800 x = np.linspace(-1.5, 1.5, res) y = np.linspace(-1.5, 1.5, res) X, Y = np.meshgrid(x, y) Z = X + 1j*Y c = 0.285 + 0.01j max_iter = 200 diverge = np.full(Z.shape, False, dtype=bool) iterations = np.zeros(Z.shape, dtype=int) for i in range(max_iter): mask = ~diverge Z[mask] = Z[mask]**2 + c diverge[mask] = np.abs(Z[mask]) > 2 iterations[mask] = i # color palette: magenta, blue, pink, lime palette = np.array([ [1.0, 0.0, 1.0], # magenta [0.0, 0.0, 1.0], # blue [1.0, 0.0, 1.0], # pink (same as magenta, tweak if needed) [0.0, 1.0, 0.0] # lime ]) # map iterations to 0-3 norm_iter = (iterations / iterations.max() * 3).astype(int) rgb = palette[norm_iter] # edge glow edges = sobel(rgb.mean(axis=2)) glow = gaussian_filter(edges, sigma=5) rgb += np.expand_dims(glow, -1) # broadcast to RGB # final blur rgb = gaussian_filter(rgb, sigma=1) plt.figure(figsize=(8,8)) plt.imshow(np.clip(rgb,0,1)) plt.axis('off') plt.show() ``` Play around with `sigma` on the gaussian filter and the palette to fine‑tune the neon look. Let me know how it turns out!
Luntik Luntik
Nice code, cool! I’ll hit run, bump sigma a bit for a softer glow, maybe swap the pink for a bright cyan, and add a little random jitter to the palette so it feels more jellyfish‑y. Can’t wait to see the neon tentacles dance!