Volcanic surface fractal

This is a short post about a new type of fractal surface.
Simple fractal surfaces are currently rare, which makes finding an example surface for a particular roughness (or fractal dimension) infeasible.
Looking at the simpler case of 2d curves we can quite easily pick a curve for a particular roughness by using a Levy, Koch curve or dragon curve with a chosen bend angle. It would be nice to have an equivalent for a surface.

Here it is, we replace each triangle with 6 smaller triangles of the same shape, with 4 of these forming a diamond based pyramid. Using the pyramid as the base, we parametise the bend angle by choosing the height of the pyramid for unit length base edges. Here are the first three iterations:

If you have a good graphics card and running Chrome then you can see it changing in real-time here:
http://glslsandbox.com/e#4851.17

For pyramid base edge length 1, height h and diamond acute angle a the pyramid and therefore the triangle shape can be fully defined by the equations:

   a = atan(((1+2cos(a)+cos(a)²)/d)^0.5) + atan(((1-2cos(a)+cos(a)²)/d)^0.5)
   d = 4h² + sin(a)²

This shows the fractal with heights from -0.25 up to 1.0.
From 0 up to around 1.75 the Hausdorff dimension increases from 2 up to infinity. The reason the dimension can exceed 3 is that overlapping surfaces 'overfill' the space; mathematically speak, the set is no longer embedded in 3D space.
In fact, as the height increases the fractal 'explodes' out exponentially in size. So it reminds me of a volcano, going from a crater to billowing smoke that covers everything!

When the height is around 0.55 (4th pic from left) the surface is the roughest it can be without intersecting. This has dimension roughly 2.32. The height of 0.5520923 is interesting for another reason, the triangles are all isosceles at this point (angles 1.1697(*2) and 0.8021). It is tempting to think that this might be the same critical point, but not sure.

The Hausdorff dimension D is the solution to the equation:
4A^D + (A/d)^D + (A/c)^D = 1
where A = cd/(d+c) and
c = sqrt(cos^2(a/2) + h^2)
d = sqrt(sin^2(a/2) + h^2)

The model file for the 0.55 surface is available as .obj and .aoi here and here. The surface also discussed briefly here and in this article.

Here's a 2D version, it looks like this for increasing angles 22.5 degrees, 45 degrees, 180*0.29:

Variation:

If you reverse the normals of the sub-triangles in the iteration then you have an effect similar to how the Koch curve differs from the Levy C curve. So you end up with a surface which looks the same whichever side you look at it from:

In this case the largest height before self intersection is about 0.35, as in the picture.

Unlike in the 3d case, the 2d equivalent can go to a larger bend angle before intersecting when its non-V line segment is flipped, here at 45 degrees and the maximum at 60 degrees:

This curve is surprisingly symmetric in its design, and like the Koch curve, you can make a snowflake out of it.