Smoother Landscapes

The previous post described using the colour information in a Mandelbrot or Julia image to represent height and so create a surface.

I found some of the plots to be a little spiky or noisy. Applying smoothing takes some of the edges off the height values and makes for a smoother more pleasing landscape. In IPython it is really easy to apply Gaussian smoothing for example. See the following before and after.

Before smoothing:
2-dimensional plot:

3-dimensional plot:

After smoothing:
2-dimensional plot:

3-dimensional plot: