I've been popping into FF for a while and y'all do awesome stuff.
I've been fixated for a while now on the "pure" Mandelbrot/Julia space, and finally decided to dig more into that.
Particularly, I was inspired by
http://www.utopiansky.com/labratory/fractals/ - exploring the non-Mandelbrot and non-Julia planes, particularly the perturbed images, I was pretty sure there was interesting stuff to be mined from pure Juliabrots.
So I cooked up a "raytracer" in Java (I'm afraid it's not as polished as some of what you guys are cranking!...) The 'step' size is based on the mathematical distance between screen pixels where the eye vector crosses the plane of the screen (what I wanted was to render all the visible "voxels", so the higher the res of the image, the finer the step size is...) Once I hit a surface, I do a series of binary refinements (I've been using 7, to get the refinement to under 1% of a voxel), etc.
For coloring, I'm basing colors on the 'magnitude of Z in the last iteration' (ala Nick's "Fill Magnitude Rendermode" from the applet above). I noticed when using Nick's applet that, when using 'last mag of Z' to color Mandelbrot/Julia points, you get information on periodicity - bulbs which correspond to a factor of "max iterations" color with 'near zero' magnitudes. (And if you pick a prime number, you get the bulbs to color locally the same but differently from their neighbors... so it makes for an interesting surface).
My "max iterations" is cranked really high: the images I've done so far use
20,011 as the escape value (the first prime above 20k). This is to eliminate as much 'noise' - false hits - as possible from the images. In 2d, false hits are OK because the points around them give contextual information, but when doing a 3d raycast I feel false hits tend to muck up the shading (at least for me).
The goal at this point is to be able to visualize "all" of the points in the Juliabrot set, by rendering 3d slices as frames of an animation where the 4th axis is varied over 'time'. Ultimately, there will be four (4) animations, each one using a different component (Cr, Ci, Zr or Zi) for time. Then of course there's zoom explorations, etc...
Anyway! 'Nuff said 'bout that. Below are some of the images I've got so far. I think the 3rd one (@ 800x600) took ~9 minutes to render on my laptop. I've also done a series of images where Zi is varied as 'time', I'll put those up later.
(a) Essentially a basic Mandelbrot as a 3d "slice"
(b) Extending the Mandelbrot upward varying the initial real component of Z (instead of being fixed at '0'), showing the "slices" of the 'Cr x Zr' plane and the 'Ci x Zr' plane
(c) Removing the constraints, showing all points (except for screen clipping
) in Juliabrot where initial imaginary component of Z is fixed at '0'
This last one is hard to "see" - I expect that an animation of rotating views will give more visual context.
More to come...
Thanks again for the inspirations and the overall cool stuff you folks create!
- Mike
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