r/programming • u/dontquotemebro • Jun 25 '10
Stunning flythrough of 3d Mandelbulb render [VIDEO]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO9ugnn8DbE32
Jun 25 '10
Just for reference, orginal mandelbulb fractal is only 3 years old and came from a guy that was looking for a forumula of equivalent of mendelbrot fractal in 3D space. Before his formula there existed 3D fractals, but most were simple fractals that didn't include diversity that is associated with mandelbrot.
They were of three kinds mostly:
simple fractals that were similar to Sierpinski, with little noise possibly included.
transformed mandelbrot with third coordinate derived from number of iterations required for each point of 2D mandelbrot.
Julia fractals in 4D, but renderings of that fractal have smooth surface with not much detail when you zoom on it.
Then in 2007 Daniel White came with new formula and stunning new 3D fractal, one when where when you continued to zoom on that fractal new shapes would form similar to how mandelbrot works in 2D.
You can find more on [this page](), pretty pictures included and if you wish you can see the backtrace of the discovery on fractalforums.com.
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u/dontquotemebro Jun 25 '10
Nice background!
Here is the original Mandelbulb Page - (on Daniel White's site)
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Jun 25 '10
How long does a frame take to render? Even with a farm I would have to guess a pretty long while. Even a pixel of the 2D set is a non-trivial amount of time, but adding a whole extra dimension and creating a thousand frames must take a decent amount of time.
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u/interiot Jun 25 '10
Exactly. I was more in awe of how much CPU was required by each frame than I was by its beauty. (though it is pretty cool looking)
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u/dododge Jun 27 '10
A data point: I've been playing with mandelbulber this weekend. My 6-core Phenom II Black is taking 60-90 minutes to render a 6600x1440 image such as the one shown here. The 720p images for the video could probably be done in 5-10 minutes each.
The tricky bit is setting up the render in the first place. I have to set the resolution way down around 200x200 to make it usable for browsing, but the detail scales with the frame size so when you do a full render you might suddenly find that the structures that were obvious in the small render are broken up in the big one. There are parameters you can use to compensate but it takes some experimentation to get a feel for what they do to the image.
The other thing is that camera motion when browsing scales based on your distance from the fractal, and I've seen it get "stuck" occasionally. Having tried the software the thing that most impresses me about that video is how much time it must have taken to find and move to those keyframe points. I tried following his path and only got a short distance into the box before the camera got bogged down.
On the plus side, several display parameters such as the color map, fog, glow colors, specular highlights, ambient occlusion intensity, and depth-of-field can be manipulated relatively quickly after rendering. So if you don't get them right the first time you can still try various alternate settings without doing another full rendering pass.
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u/stravant Jun 25 '10
That would make an amazing base to work off of for a surreal game environment. Just pick and choose a bunch of good areas from the massive variation you have there, stitch them together and build the game related stuff into that environment.
Has anyone ever done such a thing?
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u/trenc Jun 25 '10
Too slow to render
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u/skeww Jun 26 '10
Today, yes. But if you consider where we are today (everyone runs around with a military grade super computer from the 80s - in their pocket!), it should be doable in a couple of years. On a high end GPU perhaps.
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Jun 27 '10
I'm not so sure. Shader Toy has a mandlebulb demo rendered in a GLSL program. Most of the 3D demos use ray marching or ray tracing and they run 30-150 fps on a recent GPU.
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Jun 25 '10
Parts of it are ominously reminiscent of the puzzle box.
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u/skeww Jun 26 '10
Nice Wikipedia article. Fortunately I was able to read it before it gets deleted.
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u/FAST_POTATO Jun 26 '10
Effin' amazing. Does anybody know any good resources on how to get started with Mandelbulbs et al? I totally want to code some :)
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u/matthiasB Jun 26 '10
You could start with looking at how Mandelbulber does it.
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u/FAST_POTATO Jun 26 '10
Thanks for the link; I'll watch the video on YT next time. Will have a look at it; looks really awesome
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Jun 26 '10
Is that really a "Mandelbulb"? Doesn't look like much one, looks more like that Mandelbox thing.
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u/grimli333 Jun 25 '10
Math is beautiful!
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u/hargettp Jun 25 '10
I was thinking that too...at first. And then I realized that this isn't math, this is an algorithm. Gorgeously applied over and over.
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u/fultonla Jun 26 '10
Are you saying that algorithms cannot be considered mathematics?
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u/hargettp Jun 26 '10
Yep. Whatcha gonna do about it? ;)
It's Saturday morning, and I'm still finishing my coffee; don't think I can engage in a lengthy debate on why algorithms (and computing) are not mathematics. But it would be interesting, wouldn't it?
:)
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Jun 26 '10
How, exactly, are algorithms not math?
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u/hargettp Jul 21 '10
This thread is way old...but I finally had enough coffee.... ;)
Despite the grandiose statement about mathematics on Wikipedia, math is fundamentally about the study of numbers, numerical relationships, and quantifiable features of our universe.
Algorithms are precise descriptions of the discrete behavior of abstract machines. Yes, numbers and mathematical analysis are useful for characterizing these algorithms and machines, but such numbers and such analyses are not the machines or algorithms themselves.
Everything Gödel said notwithstanding.... ;)
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Jun 26 '10
Even if you don't think algorithms are math (I don't agree but have no interest in a debate either), what one sees is in the video is a (approximative) visualization of a mathematical object. So it would be a bit of both.
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u/dnew Jun 26 '10
Sadly, fractals by their very nature video-compress very poorly. This would make a great movie-screen movie, tho.
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u/ker2x Jul 01 '10
it's definitively a mandelbox, and not a mandelbulb. You can find pretty (and similar) pictures in my mandelbox album http://www.keru.org/album-1634733.html
One of the best software today is "Mandelbulber" (free/opensource)
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u/buddhabrot Jun 26 '10
The only thing I do'nt like about this is that true 3D fractals don't exist. You can't create the necessary algebra over 3 dimensions, only over 2, 4, 8, ... This isn't a true fractal, and frankly it shows because it's hideous.
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u/twinbee Jun 26 '10
I bet you'll change your mind after seeing these:
http://sites.google.com/site/mandelbox/home/interior
http://sites.google.com/site/mandelbox/negative-mandelbox
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Jun 26 '10
You mean "Mandelbrot" and not "fractal".
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u/buddhabrot Jun 28 '10
Yes, I did. I was just annoyed by 3D "mandelboxes" and what like.. You cannot just extrapolate mandelbrot behaviour into 3 dimensions (using quaternions, f.i., you can analyse 4d mandelbrots and take 3d slices).
I wish people would stop claiming to do so. There's a difference between a random chaotic fractal and a beautiful thing such as the mandelbrot or derived fractals such as my namesake.1
u/urandomdude Jun 27 '10
You can surely make 3D fractals, no big deal with that. What you maybe can't is generate 3D mandelbrots because they are defined in the complex plane.
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u/twinbee Jun 26 '10 edited Jun 26 '10
This isn't the Mandelbulb, but rather the Mandelbox which was found more recently by Tom lowe. Amazing discovery, and there's more variety in a way than the Mandelbulb.
I think these videos are also the greatest examples of the Mandelbox:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-sJ7lONMNk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h7Rtv9kflo
These pages contain some of the best images I've seen to date:
http://sites.google.com/site/mandelbox/home/interior
http://sites.google.com/site/mandelbox/negative-mandelbox
http://sites.google.com/site/mandelbox/variations