Welcome to Fractal Forums

just stumbled over it at facebook, that dude is still working on that ultra crisp web based fractal renderer:
http://sub.blue/fractal-lab
 :angel1:

Glad to see this - hope he releases the code. Tom's Mandelbulb shader got me started down the fractal rabbit hole. Fun ride!

 :surprised:
from the link http://sub.blue/fractal-lab
:thumbsup1:
I like the tweening and keyframe controls.

and what exactly is he doing with the primitives ?!?!?!

WOW, and those Kleinians!!!!    :o:beer::o:beer::o:beer:

Thanks guys! It's the combined efforts of many people exploring the algorithms within these forums that make this field so much fun :) The video has had a crazy number of views over the past couple of days so maybe we'll see a few new faces exploring these forums too.

:) It's great to hear that! I still have a few more things I want to achieve with it first, but then I will open-source it. No timescales yet though.


It's a geometry trap - after each iteration pass the iterating point does a distance estimation to a primitive shape and the minimum distance stored to get the geometric union effect of the structure. Then by being able to rotate and scale the primitive shape you can get a huge variety of new structures from the same base fractal algorithm.

Compared to something like Mandelbulb3D there are only really a handful of different algorithms, but each have been parametrised and augmented with rotation, scaling and additional transformation features that there is still a massive parameter space to explore (as seen with some of the more crazy looking Kleinian structures in the screen captures).

In reply to your personal message ck about the hybrids - I did actually explore that a few years ago with my PixelBender scripts. Both as alternating between two formulas between iterations, and running both in parallel and then blending their distance estimates. However, I found that more manageable results could be found by augmenting the single fractal formula.

An important factor in developing FL was that the user interface had to be very clean and enjoyable to use (I get very frustrated if the UI gets in the way when I'm trying to explore something creatively ;) Everything has to be immediately responsive with very accurate control because otherwise many interesting structures could be missed since a 0.001 change on one parameter could be when everything suddenly pops out.

Also at the time the GPUs I had access too would lock up if the shaders became too complex, so I've not implemented the full Hybrid features. Instead I've focused more on trying to build the best rendering engine I can. Even with the fairly standard base fractal types there is still a vast parameter space to explore creatively!

A more dynamic node based render pipeline would certainly be one approach to properly implementing hybrids - the output of which compiles to a single shader and building the UI accordingly. Not something FL can do in its current form just now.

It's all good fun though :D

thank you for the information tom, for sure the user interface is what strikes most because of its responsiveness and the fine-tune capability,
that global illumination renderer is as well a precious thing to have, wooooooooooot, animation feature is what is missing most of the renderers right now, using shaders, i know that synthclipse will feature timeline soon, but the current contest could REALLY make use of the advanced animation capabilities ;)
@tom why not blast us away with an incredible compo entry ?!  :embarrass:

Have to admit, those Klinians look super, at the release of Frax, I started begging Tom for this, beautiful beginning Tom and thank you

Due to limitations of bandwidth I was unable to actually watch the video at work.....all I can say is Damn, that looks beautiful Tom. Does it support a Z Buffer? It all looks amazing and it will be hard to wait for us mortals to get our hands on it.....beautiful job

wow!  :o  :D
Incredible!
even more so that you plan to make it open source!  :joy:
please keep us posted!

Fantastic overview. IMHO that beats all current developments in that sector by far! Creative and innovative, that's subblue as we know him...
 :cantor_dance:

I can't wait for the open-source to be available.

Can I be on a list to be notified when Fractal Lab 2015 is released?

Thanks for your all your great work Tom.