1) Your current Minecraft name (IGN):

hhhzzzsss

3) Do you have a discord account? If yes, post your username#discriminator here.

hhhzzzsss#1611

2) How often you plan to be active as a MB on Total Freedom? (Daily, once a week etc.)

I probably won't maintain a consistent level of activity on TF.

Lately I've been here practically every day because I have the time and because EpsilonBot is my most recent project, but I like to work on a variety of projects and TF will not always be my focus.

Nonetheless, I've had a lot of fun with my latest project and will definitely come around to do other interesting things from time to time.

3) Will you help contribute to building projects when requested by the Executive Creative Designer (ECD)?:

Depends

4) What type of building skill(s) do you currently possess (terraforming, redstone, interior, exterior):

Procedural and/or mathematical builds, as evidenced by what I've been making with EpsilonBot.

I've done stuff like terraforming, redstone, and interior/exterior design for fun, but I would not consider myself to be very skilled in these regards since I've never spent that much time on it.

5) Provide several screenshots with 3+ of your own builds, without any form of shaders:

This first image is called Quaternion Geode, and it's Quaternion Julia Set that I made to look like a geode with some escape-time coloring tricks.

This one is just Astolfo. I spent a few days working on a system to convert mmd models into minecraft structures (including the colors), which was actually quite the challenge due to how the textures were mapped, but I eventually succeeded and made this to show after giving him some sort of pose in Blender.

These next two pictures are of a giant oak tree I made. My methodology to create this is based on the following paper: http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/colonization.egwnp2007.pdf, but integrating the described methodology into Minecraft provided many challenges of its own. You can see the level of detail it has in the close-up screenshot taken from inside the tree. I spent days refining the algorithm for this, and this isn't even my first time doing this. I've done a similar thing on Kaboom, but since I'm doing it a second time with EpsilonBot I've rewrote it from scratch and made my methodology produce even better results.

Believe it or not, the following images are made with the exact same tree-generating method. Since I already wrote the framework for this when making Giant Oak, it didn't take very long to make the next two builds. Version 1 is without the extra glass decorations and version 2 is with them.

This is another thing I made with the tree-generator. Root ball. I tweaked the parameters to make it look very scraggly like tree roots.

The following build is a bit of an old one that I made on Kaboom.pw, but I think it's worth showing. Believe it or not, this is actually the main end island. With HBot, I scanned the island and used diffusion-limited aggregation to build this structure on top of it. It's not shown clearly in the images, but the giant branching structures you see are all actually branching off of the bedrock on top of the end pillars where the end crystals normally are. Unfortunately, I no longer have this build since Kaboom resets its world daily and I never bothered to save it as a schematic.

I've actually done lots of stuff like this on Kaboom, but since I haven't saved many screenshots of them and don't want to make this too long, I won't include them all here.

And finally, I can't leave out EpsilonBot's very first build: Blue Mandelbulb. It may not look so spectacular to most, but it has its place in my heart as one of my favorite fractals.

6) If there was one thing that you would say you could improve on within your builds, what would it be?

I've heard a few people mentioning that some of my builds are causing them lag, so perhaps that is something I should consider improving on? I don't really want to sacrifice the level of detail, but I'm sure I can strike a good balance with more experience.

Other than that, this is a pretty new thing to me since I only came up with the idea of making procedural builds in Minecraft a few weeks ago, so I'll learn more about where and how to improve as time goes on.

7) (Optional) Do you do any other form of creative work (e.g. drawing, animation, video design, etc.)

I have basic knowledge of using blender, which was helpful when designing a system to convert mmd models into Minecraft. I also know a bit regarding color theory and composition, but I'm no artist.

Does fractal art count too? I love designing and rendering fractals, and my pfp is one of the fractals I came up with. In fact, I just love fractals in general.

(Optional) If any players can vouch or provide further evidence for you being the builder behind your builds, please list their names:

I'm not sure who exactly to name, but I'm sure a lot of players have seen and talked to me as I was developing EpsilonBot and creating procedural builds with it.

Additional Comments

To be honest, my main reason for applying as a Master Builder is that I want to be able to upload schematics. Lately, EpsilonBot has been spending all its time building mapart, so I haven't really been making any new procedural builds with it.

Additionally, even when EpsilonBot is free, I'm limited by the fact that it has to build everything by hand. Since any build with a lot of blocks in it would take a super long time to build, I need to spend a lot of time thinking about how to make my structures have as few blocks as possible, from making non-transparent portions of builds hollow to altogether not making builds that I think would have too many blocks in it (such as the Mandelbox).

On a final note, I've always loved procedural generation and fractals, and I would be happy to get to share my little projects with you all. Thanks for reading this whole thing. I made it a bit long.

(Also why are the numbers in the template application out of order).

↩ @' 5 '

I think you make a fair point about the Mandelbulb, since it is not one of my more original creations and probably one of the simplest ones at that, but I'd like to mention that creativity and effort still went into making it.

For one, I put quite a bit of work into the whole framework that allows me to create these procedural structures in Minecraft. It's a system where the code I write generates an output that is automatically detected and loaded by a local server so that I can get instant feedback in-game while designing and refining my creations.

But more importantly, there's more to rendering a fractal than the base equation alone. Take the iconic Mandelbrot set. When graphed on its own with no extra flair, it looks, as I've heard it described, "like a squashed bug".

Any amount of color or decoration you see beyond that is already going beyond a simple graph of the fractal produced by the equation. While most people use a simple escape-time algorithm (perhaps with iteration-count smoothing), you can do much fancier things with the coloring, like zoom location, orbit trapping, derivatives and more. This is why so many people can create pictures and animations of the exact same fractal and have them all look different in quality. Sometimes it's simple, but other times quite a lot of thought is put into how it is colored. Here is my favorite example:

In my case, my approach to coloring Mandelbulb wasn't all that fancy. I used three axis-aligned planes as orbit traps to determine the shade of blue I should use. However, I still had to think about how to make things work well in Minecraft. For one, fractals and orbit traps especially usually produce a continuous spectrum of colors, but Minecraft does not have a continuous spectrum of block colors, so I had to consider how to make it look nice with discrete colors.

I will admit that my approach to coloring is very similar that of Inigo Quiliez (https://iquilezles.org/articles/mandelbulb/), but I'd like to think that creating this required more skill and effort than downloading and building a schematic with litematica.

edit: first image wasn't properly displaying so I replaced it.