A second look at the dragon fractal

At first when I drew the (twin)dragon fractal, I had a small bug. I used the base 1+i instead of 1-i. This also generated a very similar looking beast. Thinking about that for a while, made me curious. Just like the Mandelbrot set, maybe other interesting fractals could be generated using exactly the same method, with a different complex ‘seed’.

So I patched up my code, and made it output a series of images for complex numbers on a path. I thought the reasonable choice would be a spiral, so using t*(cost+isint) as a base I wrote a spiral that would go around the origin several times and finally land on 1-i.
It might seem obvious to you to try and make this interactive instead – why not move the mouse around and watch the different fractals that emerge? Well, I wanted a video.

I also wanted the fractal to convey a little more information. So each point in the set was given a color according to its generation. I decided after some trial and error that white was better for the older generation, and red for younger generations.
After some PIL and ffmpeg work, it was ready.

While working on the video, I witnessed some very interesting fractals with different seeds.
I was very curious as to why certain shapes emerged. For example, a square pattern was very common:

This turned out to be not that surprising. Its generator number is of the shape 0+ia. So it made sense. I still didn’t figure out how come hexagon shapes were so common:

Maybe it had something to do with pi/6, I’m not too sure about that. If it did, I would expect to see many more regular polygons.
Here is another curious one:

Another interesting phenomenon was what I started to call ‘the dragon’s heart’. You see, in the final dragon, the starting generations were spread about pretty evenly. However, with other bases, even ones generating something which is pretty similar to the dragon, the starting generations are clustered together – sometimes at the side, sometimes at the middle.

I’ve got a feeling (not proven or anything) that to be space filling, a fractal’s starting generations should be spread about. What do you think?