{"id":16763,"date":"2025-08-22T09:23:33","date_gmt":"2025-08-22T13:23:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/pick\/?p=16763"},"modified":"2025-08-22T09:23:33","modified_gmt":"2025-08-22T13:23:33","slug":"printing-infinity-bringing-fractals-to-life-in-3d-with-matlab-and-pi3mft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/pick\/2025\/08\/22\/printing-infinity-bringing-fractals-to-life-in-3d-with-matlab-and-pi3mft\/","title":{"rendered":"Printing Infinity: Bringing Fractals to Life in 3D with MATLAB and PI3MFT"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.mathworks.com\/matlabcentral\/profile\/authors\/20789457\">Mike<\/a>\u2019s Pick this week is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mathworks.com\/matlabcentral\/fileexchange\/158166-pi3mft\">PI3MFT<\/a> by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mathworks.com\/matlabcentral\/profile\/authors\/8668631\">Nicolas Douillet<\/a><\/p>\r\n\r\nI am sure that, <a href=\"https:\/\/uk.mathworks.com\/matlabcentral\/communitycontests\/contests\/4\/entries\/74\">like me<\/a>, many of you have played around with generating fractals in MATLAB. <a href=\"https:\/\/uk.mathworks.com\/matlabcentral\/profile\/authors\/8668631\">Nicolas Douillet<\/a>, 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 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/nicosahedron\/albums\/\">superb Fickr album<\/a> that showcases his computational art); he also uses MATLAB to 3D print his work and produce physical models of these mathematical structures.\r\n\r\n<div id=\"attachment_16766\" style=\"width: 440px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/pick\/files\/cubeBaseKockSnowflake.jpg\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-16766\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-16766\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/pick\/files\/cubeBaseKockSnowflake-995x1024.jpg\" alt=\"3D printed fractal: Cube base Koch snowflake\" width=\"430\" height=\"443\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-16766\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">3D printed fractal produced by PI3MFT<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\nThe 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.\u00a0 It's called <strong>Printable Iterative 3D Meshed Fractal toolbox ((PI3MFT)<\/strong> and is available on the <a href=\"https:\/\/uk.mathworks.com\/matlabcentral\/fileexchange\/158166-pi3mft\">MATLAB File Exchange<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/NicolasDouillet\/PI3MFT\">GitHub<\/a>.\r\n\r\n<div id=\"attachment_16769\" style=\"width: 449px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/pick\/files\/SierpinkskiOctohedron.jpg\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-16769\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-16769\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/pick\/files\/SierpinkskiOctohedron-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"439\" height=\"329\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-16769\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">3D printed Sierpinksi octehedron iteration #3<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<div class=\"overview-image\"><img decoding=\"async\"  class=\"img-responsive\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/pick\/files\/cubeBaseKockSnowflake-995x1024.jpg\" onError=\"this.style.display ='none';\" \/><\/div><p>Mike\u2019s Pick this week is PI3MFT by Nicolas Douillet\r\n\r\nI am sure that, like me, many of you have played around with generating fractals in MATLAB. Nicolas Douillet, however, has taken things to the... <a class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/pick\/2025\/08\/22\/printing-infinity-bringing-fractals-to-life-in-3d-with-matlab-and-pi3mft\/\">read more >><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":176,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[40,16,44],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/pick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16763"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/pick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/pick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/pick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/176"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/pick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16763"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/pick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16763\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16805,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/pick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16763\/revisions\/16805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/pick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/pick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/pick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}