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I've been following the Mandelbulb discussion for the past couple of months with great interest. I've written a version that runs in Adobe's Pixel Bender Toolkit using the GPU. The nice thing about the Pixel Bender Toolkit (other than the fact that Adobe release it for free!) is that the filters can be used directly in Photoshop CS4 which greatly opens up the image manipulation possibilities. I'm fine tuning the filter and will release it soon, but in the mean time here are some example renderings. All images were rendered within a few seconds with 9x antialiasing with my iMac's NVIDIA 8800GS GPU:


HR Giger was here first:
(http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2521/4131727645_179eb9bb48_o.png) (http://www.flickr.com/photos/subblue/4131727645/)


Juliaberry:
(http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2607/4134197373_130bb25682_b.jpg) (http://www.flickr.com/photos/subblue/4134197373/)


Mandelbulb star:
(http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2724/4148811390_da41ac70ed_o.jpg) (http://www.flickr.com/photos/subblue/4148811390/)


Radiolaria - an interesting accident created by setting a maximum value of the y component of the triplex z number:
(http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2593/4163368130_1931bac18b_b.jpg) (http://www.flickr.com/photos/subblue/4163368130/)

Juliaberry deserves an award. Very tasty.

Fantastic! Love the wada basin boundaries in the julia berry. A few seconds eh? Amazing.

Great work - love the wax berry too. It's always when part of the light reflects out white (standard reflection), and the other comes out super saturated (due to passing through translucent coloured material), that things always look spectacular. I'd die to see that kind of material with better shadowing or even global illumination.

so who's gonna find the juliaberry-tree? :D

HR Giger looks like a forest, so maybe it can be found there somewhere...

I've just browsed your web site and found lots of interesting things implemented in PixelBender. Fractals, landscapes, 3D Julia sets, Escher-like effects. Wow.

The most interesting fact about PixelBender is that you can embed these filters inside Flash apps served by a web site. It has never been so simple to publish new and interactive 3D fractals and render them inside your web browser. I am also astonished by the hardware support of PixelBender. They can render this even on the ancient Geforce 6xxx series? wow. Probably they break this down into pixel shaders.

I am very much looking forward to your published version of the Mandelbulb PixelBender.

Christian

Thanks Christian!

Pixel Bender is interesting technology. It isn't quite at the state of doing full GPU powered Flash though. There are actually quite a few limitations when exporting the filters for use in Flash - for instance all filters run via the CPU rather than GPU and there is no support for loops, which makes fractal generation scripts practically impossible! It's only in its first version so hopefully future versions of Flash will have full GPU support. Using the filters in the PixelBender Toolkit IDE or via the Photoshop CS4 plugin is very usable and a great way to quickly explore different parameters and ways of coding.

I've now released the scripts, see over here for details (http://www.fractalforums.com/mandelbulb-implementation/mandelbulb-ray-tracing-plugin-for-photoshop-aftereffects-and-quartzcomposer/).