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this question i should probably formulating direct to Jess, but probably many of you that work with 3D softwares such as  3D Max, Maya etc  would love to have such a powerful plugin as Mandelbulb right in the Max, i mean , i got no idea how difficult is to do this , but image its real potential when this will happen, i mean personally i would love to have Mb3D as plugin in 3D Max so much more easy and more speeding process do to  Mac or Maya core integration ..

cheers ;)

I think it rather doubtful as that would require that the bulbs be mapped as polygons...one hell of a world different....but I wouldn't mind seeing it in C4D myself

... not really ... especially a render program could deal perfectly with a pure implicit surface definition, and some renderers somehow provide this, in fact it is just a matter of fact until the "big" renderers incorporate such objects in their rendering engine ... it will happen, its just a matter of time, in fact, from a theoretical point of view it is the base-work and theoretical foundation that is layed out by such programs ( like mb3d and mandelbulber ) and the techniques are generally very well known, its just that the "professional" rendering programs set upon the horse of describing a scene using triangles, and spheres for example are in many rendering programs already "true spheres", but the technique of assembling such surfaces and fine grading them is not yet common for the programs


in fact, it is really really just a matter of time until the programs jump on the horses we lay out for them, and the possibilities are ... a little more than infinite ... hahaha ... :D said that, just thinking about applying the nice user interface tools like mesh-deforming to an existing implicit surface ( like a fractal one ... ) and use a mandelbox just as a tiny building block for scenes of such programs ...

another aspect is when will it be truly available in realtime gaming engines, at the virge of cyberspace regarding the occulus rift, this is a must have for true and more than nice scenes :D the discussion is a long ongoing talk about when implicit surfaces will come into 3d, but it is neglected nowadays - because of rendering power, for sure - but cyberspace needs arbitrary detailed objects to feel real for us humans, computing power and theoretical scene management for such set ups are just not experienced enough, but just stay calm and watch, it is a straightforward process coming next !!!

:D

I'd love for you to be right Christian, but I've watched and used a lot of 3D since the Amiga....and this I think will never happen in the programs mentioned....closest I know that will be out soon and be able to render Bulbs with other geometry is Artmatic Voyager....a new version out soon supporting 3D fractals....but not in a polygon type of way

There is actually this that was done a few years ago now:
http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/duncan/mandel_maya_madness

I think support for this has only just landed in the latest versions of Maya though.

ît just takes time, but the pathes are laid out ;) i would love to have the time to implement a pure implicit surfaces renderer :D

A few days ago Arnold published these Mandelbulb demos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4wy_oc6Y3A
https://support.solidangle.com/display/mayatut/How+to+Render+a+Mandelbulb+with+MtoA

Also, POV-ray has nice support for rendering implicit surfaces. Some time ago I rendered this using global illumination:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/syntopia/12570917473/

I have also played around with meshing distance fields recently (for 3D printing) and I don't think that is the way to go for integration with 3D software - you need an unholy amount of polygons for any decent resolution.

I must agree that meshing/voxelisation is not a good approach, though it is workable if you are willing to throw gigs of data on disk and memory cache at the problem. Rendering general implicit surfaces is a difficult numerical problem, and thankfully for the bulbs there are distance estimation approaches (Syntopia has an excellent survey of these techniques on his blog) that are not too difficult to integrate into most ray tracing systems.

The first 3D / perspective mandelbulb renders were actually with global illumination, but sadly I didn't go much further with that.

edit: I should also mention that Corona Renderer has a mandelbulb primitive which is handled in this way, and I've some experimental code in Indigo Renderer for implicits.