Visualize Fractals in Blender

Hi,

wanna show you an attempt to create a Mandelbrotset in 3d in blender game engine(Low Res).

Putting it in this section in the hope to discuss how it can be improved,
so that we maybe one day could use it to visualize fractals in Blender.

I used the OSL script from tree3d to render slice planes from the MandelBox Volumetric Shader.
Then I composed them to an image and put it in the “Volume Ray Casting” script by martinsh.

I think this is the first Fractal (3d) in Blender (Game Engine).

Pic


Vid

[video]https://youtu.be/Kdc97BsGidg[/video]

Blend File

Mandelbrotmenge3Dpacked.blend (2.3 MB)

credits go to:

MandelBox Volumetric Shader by tree3d

Volume Ray Casting in BGE by martinsh

Enjoy

Pretty cool, thanks for sharing

:wink: it’s just a fraction of a fractal… Nice work nevertheless!

You are welcome.

Thanks, you are absolutely right, in a limited space it is always only a piece of the fractal, of course.

You can change the number of slices in line 56 of the “vol_raycast” script to get different patterns.
Here are some examples: 12,24,120,192,220 slices:




This is really cool, where do you learn how to make fractals? Like the maths behind it and what not? Any good recommendations?

Thanks, you are absolutely right, in a limited space it is always only a piece of the fractal, of course.

In laymen terms:
For fractals there’s no limited space as they are kinda like ‘inner-dimensional’ (Fractal dimension). Is what a name ‘Fractal’ implies.

This is really cool, where do you learn how to make fractals? Like the maths behind it and what not? Any good recommendations?

Wiki is a good start.

Look at the OSL script from the MandelBox Volumetric Shader linked in post #1, this is not too complex, I guess.
Other than that, this could be a good start:
Mandelbulb
I have not coded anything myself, I am more of a visual guy and I have more questions than answers.

For example, how is the Volume Ray Casting script calculating the 3d object out of the image(s)???
There are 96 pictures a 400px x 400px.

My goal is to get a better/finer quality, so I tried different formats, for example: TGA, PNG, but I dont really get better results in the final output.

Double the size of the image 8192 x 8192, 96 pictures a 800px x 800px, still didnt get better.
Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks for that link! Sorry can’t help you with

Wiki is a good start.

Not the best though. Already tried that. Khan academy is pretty good but I haven’t had the time recently to complete it.

Wanna make some clouds, change the opacity factor in the “Volume Ray Casting” script in line 53 to 0.5-10.



Playing araund with the OSL script:


Here is a colored version using the “Thermal Vision” Script of Smoking_mirror.
It is a custom filter with an always sensor attached to the camera.
IF you wanna change the color, change the values in the line 13-16.


Flying into some fractals in the mandelbulb program, it looks so cool:



Nice experiments, still :slight_smile:
Just stumbled upon another interesting article: Path Tracing 3D Fractals

Thanks, for sure an interesting read, but way over my head.
As mentioned in another thread by KWD it could be possible to visualise fractals in blender with the right programming skills, if I understand correctly.

Hi

This looking real good…And render in viewport is no render time…Pretty cool.

The video is amazing Good work.

Tai

Nice Job! Looks pretty cool!

Actually raytracing requires a different aproach than this, you have to estimate the distance where a given ray will be blocked by geometry, but space is virtually infinite so you have to point to a place and say, ok, my thing will happen about here around this place, so you begin to orbit your fractal at that point!

Amazing work. Thanks for pushing the boundaries in Blender.

An inspiration, food for thoughts… Fractal Lab (WebGL fractal explorer)

Thanks a lot guys,appreciate it.

Here is another .blend file, I wanna share:
It is a mandelset animation.
It has only 1 Sample in Cyclesrender, so it is pretty fast to render.

Choose an output path to render the animation and click “Animation”
or
go to rendered view and hit play (Alt+A) to preview.

mandelset.blend (571 KB)

stc=1

Have Fun!