Julia Set Fractal Relief

This is one example of the many different Julia set fractals extruded into the 3rd dimension, closely related to the Mandelbrot set (see my Mandelbrot model) The height is proportional to the number of iterations before escaping.  It was made by using fractal software with a grayscale coloring and then using a custom Python script to convert it to an STL file. You can vary the z-scale to whatever looks best to you. I chose a border quite close to the "final" shape rather than a simple oval.

For those interested, the script converts each pixel to a vertex with a height given by the grayscale value  It then determines if neighboring pixels are in the same plane and deletes ones that aren't needed.  This reduces the file size considerably.  It then takes the perimeter vertices and drops them down to a plane under all the rest in order to make a manifold object.