Due to the phenomenon of Convergent Evolution, we can expect to see familiar shapes on planets in distant solar systems. Like on this one, where everything is connected. Fractal animation has not much in common with traditional animation. The fractal animator uses sliders controlling various formulas, that control how the shapes manifest on a global scale (If you tweak anything in a formula, everything changes) Then there are more traditional methods such as camera work and lighting to put these newly discovered shapes up for display. by Julius Horsthuis music: "Healing Ceremony" by James Horner
Background
This was an experiment to get a clean z-buffer. Normally I render the fractals at 1920 x 1080 with 2x anti-aliasing. This means that it renders internally at 3840 x 2160 and downsamples the framebuffer, smoothing out the jagged edges. Unfortunately, this process also smooths the z-buffer, which is never a good idea because it introduces unwanted artifacts when adding Depth of field in post. Usually I just take this for granted, but here I wanted to get it right, so I rendered everything at 4K without anti-aliasing. The entire post production pipeline had to be 4k as well, calculating the DOF also in 4K. I only downsampled to 2K at the end.
This definitely resulted in a much cleaner image, but it took a lot more work and time in post. I know I can use this trick when the image quality has to be absolutely spot-on.
Also, I used Particular in order to introduce some floating particles which felt like seeds from a pollinating flower.
Because I thought the bluish hue and alien forest looked a bit like Avatar, I used a track from that movie to complete the magic.