i got infected when i was on christmas holiday and had some playtime by the computer wit a wintry photo and my portable gimp. i needed something to make frost flowers for a window and figured ice crystal in the fractal explorer filter might work. i ended up trying all the fractals in that filter as frost and starting to experiment with the settings to see where i could find something nice looking. it was more fun than i thought. i feel stressed when i see too many digits in one place and i've had fractal software downloaded and installed before but never used it because it all looks so complicated. this time i had an object with what i was making and i'm rather stubborn then and don't give up at once, that's probably why i got infected this time and not before. and then i got home, with some more spare time than i've had in two months, so what did i do? ta-taa! i installed and started experimenting with mandelbulb3d. i've only just started learning and my skills in processing fractal images in gimp aren't very high, but here's some first attempts:



(since i try a new technique i should try making something i really want to make, or i'll just give up at the first sight of difficulty, so i decided to make bling )

nice if you make the bg transparent before transform, then you may layer more variant together, may give more depth

Not bad to start with. My early attempts were appalling. One thing you can do is paste somebody elses parameters into M3D and study them to get an idea of how they achieved their fractal.

Very nice, I can see where some nice jewellry could be made out of some of these

photo comix: what do you mean by making it transparent before transform? you mean there's a way to do that inside m3d? i had so much problem with the colouring and shading in these, rendering nice looking fractals is no problem at all, but how to give them the right colours and lighting seems like a thing i could spend years before i learned! and processing them in gimp is not exactly easy either, it's even harder than photo manipulation.
erisian: thank you for the encouragement ! i understand using someone else's parameters is the logical way to start, but i can't get myself to do it because it feels like i'm not doing my own thing then. funny, because i never feel like this when i use other people's photos for a collage or texturing or something, but starting off from someone else's fractal felt entirely wrong. i felt like a three year old who wants to get dressed by herself without grown up help or interference .
molly: thanks, that's what i was thinking . i just have to learn how to make things look a bit shiny first.

I didn't mean using somebody else's work but having a look at it to get an idea of how to combine formulas for example. To get a transparent background, as well as your image, save a z buffer image to use as a layer mask. I don't know for sure as I haven't used M3d for ages but I think the latest versions might allow the saving of PNG images with transparent backgrounds. I know somebody asked for it but I don't know if it has been implemented.