What are "3D Burning Ship fractals"?

Are they mostly the result of graphics techniques to make interesting looking things, or is this something of substantial academic interest.

I used trial and error to discover that formula, while looking for interesting visual results.

Since the complex pane is 2D, I have a hunch this is more "art" than a mathematical research field, but I don't know.

It (the pursuit of fractal art formulas) led me to some engineering ideas that would be useful. Maybe not this formula in particular, but the pursuit is perhaps valuable, even if mathematically generated artwork wasn't considered to be a research field in the past. I do believe that a friend announced that they were in a postgrad program centered on mathematical art generation, but I'd like to ask them more in case I misunderstood what they said.

That said, did I misunderstand what you said, in the sense that you mean theoretical instead of applied by this being a mathematical research field?

The actual 3D BS formula (take |abs| of each component, add in c) was slightly different.