Hydra: A Spooky 4K Mandelbulb3D animation fly-about of a morphing creature. Caution is well advised!

Welcome to a new edition of my Inner Reaches Mandelbulb animation series. This presentation, titled 'Hydra', was made using a variety of tools starting with the Mandelbulb 3D software to setup the animation. Three fast PC's (totaling 52 cores) then rendered 8,075 animation frames over a 3.5 day period. The individual frames were then imported into DaVinci Resolve Studio 18 where they were linked together to form a motion clip. Various visual enhancements, titling and upscaling were completed in DaVinci Resolve. The soundtrack was created with Arturia's Minifreak assisted by the Cakewalk DAW by Bandlab and the Stepic sequencer by Devicemeister. The DAW audio mix was imported into the DaVinci Resolve project. The final 4K render is presented here.
The soundtrack was fun to make using Arturia's Minifreak, but challenging. My goal was a sound pallet that was interesting, but didn't own the presentation. That, itself, was challenging and I'm not sure if I actually accomplished my goal. In all honesty, I recorded 5 soundtracks before I had what I wanted. If you listen carefully, perhaps with headphones, you'll hear a weave of sound patterns made possible by a quality synthesizer.
Setting up this Mandelbulb animation was challenging because it's very time consuming to preview a long animation, in this case, 66 keyframes for a 4 minute animation at 30 frames per second. To make things even harder, I modified a few fractal formula parameters in addition to moving the camera position in an effort to create interesting and flowing movement. Much of the successful results of these Mandelbulb animations is by chance - perhaps that's what makes these project interesting. Indeed, so far I have chosen to not publish about 6 animations that I wasn't happy with. However, Hydra made it past my publication inspection. Please enjoy the presentation.
Here is a presentation I put together to describe how I made Hydra that you may enjoy: • The Making of the “Hyd...
I would like to take a moment to offer a word of encouragement to those interested in creating fractal animations. We have wonderful software tools to work with and many are free to use. PC's have become very powerful in relation to their cost. Plenty of people are open to help fellow creatives. It really comes down to the level of interest you have and the time you have to invest in this particular creative endeavor. There will not likely be any monetary rewards nor will fractal animation skills get you a better job. The reward is getting better over time producing presentations that are unique and entertaining and that are a lot of fun to make.