Printing Infinity: Bringing Fractals to Life in 3D with MATLAB and PI3MFT

Posted by Mike Croucher, August 22, 2025

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Mike’s Pick this week is PI3MFT by Nicolas Douillet

I am sure that, like me, many of you have played around with generating fractals in MATLAB. Nicolas Douillet, however, has taken things to the next level. Not only does he use MATLAB to generate fractals and display them on the screen (Take a look at his superb Fickr album that showcases his computational art); he also uses MATLAB to 3D print his work and produce physical models of these mathematical structures.

$3D printed fractal: Cube base Koch snowflake$

3D printed fractal produced by PI3MFT

The not-so-secret sauce that makes all of this possible is a free MATLAB toolbox that Nicholas has developed and made available to the world so that we can all follow in his footsteps and make our own 3D printed fractal models. It's called Printable Iterative 3D Meshed Fractal toolbox ((PI3MFT) and is available on the MATLAB File Exchange and GitHub.