Welcome to Fractal Forums

Hi there!

I′ve got in gear and started a Sourceforge project for the Amazing Boxplorer. Get it on http://sourceforge.net/projects/boxplorer (http://sourceforge.net/projects/boxplorer).

I′m looking for contributors. What′s needed right now:

• major refactorization (the code is horrible)
• Visual C++ compatibility
• OSX port
• 64-bit compatibility
• better (non-modal) controls, a HUD
• movie recording, parameter interpolation
• progressive rendering
• your own shaders (IFS, Mandelbulb)

The project will continue to use the C language and the SDL+OpenGL combo for cross-platform compatibility, but ports (e.g. to WebGL or handhelds) are welcome.

If you just want to contribute shaders or ideas, drop them here and I might take them into consideration. ;D

Enjoy!

Cool! Have you considered code.google.com for hosting? Really like their code review tools, visual diff etc.

Which version did put out there? The latest you released?
My copy has been diverging pretty drastically over time. Got the VC++, the 3d modes I posted about before and been hacking on splining between keyframes..

I haven′t, but why not. http://code.google.com/p/boxplorer (http://code.google.com/p/boxplorer)

It′s the latest released version from July (1.02) to have a baseline to build on. I′ve been experimenting with hybrids and progressive rendering, but the basic code is in bad shape.

Well, but there's so little code it remains workable ;-)
How strongly do you feel about no C++? Some things (stl::vector etc) are _really_ handy..

Just starting playing with some cheap 'progressive' rendering:
disable double buffering, enable alpha, add a uniformi 'frameno' that monotonically increases.
in start of fragment.glsl:main()

 // 'random' sampling based some bits of dot.
  if ((int(dot(dp, dp) * 10000) & 3) != (frameno & 3)) {
   gl_FragColor = vec4(0,0,0,0);
   return;
  }

So when you move, you see old pixels but when you stop moving the frame fills in.

After lots of glmatrix, glfrustum and glsl cursing, I have a rough version that projects a splined flight path between keyframes live in the z-buffered frame!

See attached screenshot. Goal is to get some visual feedback on where the hell the CatmullRom spline veers off the intended path.

But writing the z-buffer from the shader works. glFrustum and such are very much in sync with the vertex shader, etc. Lots of possibilities open up.
And, automagic driver-based stereoscopy becomes easier with a properly written z-buffer.

a test (juliabulb)> http://www.fractalforums.com/images-showcase-%28rate-my-fractal%29/exploring-boxplorer/msg25249/#msg25249
Marius, your idea is great! :)

A simple Menger-box  :embarrass:

an example (.cfg file) would be something like

Another Menger :) I've mistakenly posted this shader (in fact, I've corrected some things meanwhile) in another thread yesterday  :clown:.
Suggestion for the HUD: Anttweakbar.

I'd rather make progressive rendering from lowres samples instead (with nice upsampling). The functionality would speed up full-res too (cone-like tunnels could be cut out in lowres pass and provide better starting points for hires rays). Z-buffer will be necessary for this.

Regrding C++: For Boxplorer it's IMHO better to have the main functionality data-driven (shaders and parameter files), so I'll keep it in C as the lowest common denominator. If it would be a bigger project, I'd skip C++ and go all the way to D 2.0.

I like Anttweakbar and will incorporate it.

I think the best way to do video recording is to save all frame configs (deltas) and smooth them with a filter to mask out the jumpy controls. On-screen path grabbing and deforming would be really cool too.

Nice sponge. :-)

 :dink: here is my mbulb's test.
to run it please use Marius's version  (do a backup of the original fragment/s before)
mod.controls:
2+left/right > change power
4+left/right > bailout
6+up/down,7+left/right,7+up/down > JuliaC
6+left/right > JuliaFactor
8+left/right > RadiolariaFactor
9+up/down > RadiolariaPower

(http://nocache-nocookies.digitalgott.com/gallery/4/thumb_1322_11_12_10_3_07_04.jpeg)

visual: Please use atan(y,x) instead of atan2 and mix instead of lerp for compatibility.  ^-^

for mac (10.6) there's > http://www.interealtime.com/Boxplorer.dmg
It compiles fine under OS 10.5

Find attached a dump of Rrrola's boxplorer as I have been hacking up. Got infected with some C++ but trying to stay with the original spirit  :-\
Rrrola, have a look to see whether it could contribute to your opensource trunk.

Also included the .cfg and keyframes I just rendered this short sequence with:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXEQrKbaYhQ

In the marius-1.cfg.data/fragment.glsl you can see some LoD attempts, fog and some rotation that makes for interesting color patterns ;-)
Also added the bulb and menger shaders that were posted here earlier.

Try out the keyframe editing for kicks. It's pretty rough but does provide some control over what the splined path looks like.
There's an addendum README-20101218.txt that tries to describe the control changes.

Still a lot of loose ends but I'm not sure I have time over the holidays to tweak much (roadtrip..).
I figured some of you might be interested in playing with it in the meantime ;D

-marius

Tested / tweaked / updated some more, since I noticed building on MacOS or Linux was painful.

Find attached a version with basic commandline makefiles for Windows, MacOS and Linux.

See README-20101219.txt.
You need the SDL runtime (and SDL-dev for osx and linux). Get it at http://www.libsdl.org/download-1.2.php

Copy Makefile.<your-os> to Makefile and run make (nmake on windows).
I compile on Windows with the free Visual C++ 2010 Express (http://www.microsoft.com/express/Downloads/)

For Windows, you can use the attached sdl-windev.zip. Unzip it in the boxplorer directory. Besides that, all you need is SDL.dll in your path somewhere.

Once you have successfully built ./boxplorer, run it with one of the .cfg files as argument.
For instance './boxplorer animation-1.cfg'.

I have Windows always open .cfg files with boxplorer.exe, makes for easy clicking around  ;D

SPACE makes a keyframe at current view.
Hit the HOME key to start animation (speed depends on your computer..). TAB or END to stop animating.
Move around with WASD+mouse. Quit with 2x ESC.

To render flight sequence to disk, 'boxplorer bulb.cfg --render'. Writes bunch of .tga files to ./bulb.cfg.data/.

Best with up-to-date graphics card _and_ drivers  ;D. I run it on a ATI 5850 these days.

-marius

Added interlaced stereoscopic output for a Zalman display. Playing with that and this blended menger shader is endless fun, nice & speedy!
Getting 30 fps at 1920x1080, perfect for getting spiked out of the screen in realtime  ;D

The stereoscopic output option is a marvellous idea. What are the changes making the software compatible with a 120 Hz display using iZ3D shutter mode?

I don't have such a setup so I have no idea. It does write a proper Z-buffer so perhaps the video driver can approximate something with that, if asked properly?
Ideally there is to tell the driver a left frame and a right frame. Quad buffering? There has to be a opengl / sdl incantation that sets that up; never done it.
Surely someone on this forum has such a setup and coded something for it.

Well I have the setup, a Viewsonic model that supports iZ3D. iZ3D driver support would be great, as it supports both AMD and Nvidia.

As I understand it, SDL/OpenGL has support for stereo, but needs a driver on top, like OpenGL Quad Buffer. I'm not an expert here, but found this:
http://forums.libsdl.org/viewtopic.php?t=6399&sid=5ffce33b7690f2749a48bae2cd9be6ac

iZ3D has support for OpenGL Quad Buffer, but it seems to be targeted at pro cards and might be limited to the iZ3D monitor currently. I have to check that one.

What are the other options? There's Tridef, but that limits the supported hardware as well.

I have a secondary Zalman stereoscopic display but haven't bothered with getting the iZ3D driver going (yet).
Maybe I'll have a try at it this weekend.
Note my stereoscopic hacks to boxplorer don't do proper asymmetric frustums, rather two parallel ones.
Might fix that at some point.. easiest would to be to render a little wider and crop.

Have you tried some of those sample openGL / SDL apps to do stereo on top of your iZ3D driver?

some tests using Marius's rots: press 2(up/down or left/right) and 3 (left/right) to rotate-morph (?) and 4 (left/right) to change scale setting.

Haven't heard from Rrrrola. Still around?

I got tired of not having source control and sending .zip files around so I dumped my version on code.google.com here:

http://code.google.com/p/boxplorer2/

Added a recent win32 build (.exe, .cfg, .glsl files) for download as well.

I integrated AntTweakBar; Makefile.osx and Makefile.linux need some work there.

I added basic SDL and AntTweakBar files in the repo, so building for windows could be as simple as:

C:\projects> svn checkout http://boxplorer2.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ boxplorer2-read-only
C:\projects> cd boxplorer2-read-only
C:\projects\boxplorer2-read-only> nmake -f Makefile.win32

 ;D I have installed boxplorer2 on my computer. I have a quad core intel q6600 with an Nvidia card which is a Geforce 9800gt. I get the following error message:
'The procedure entry point_invalid_parameter_noinfo_noreturn could not be located in the dynamic link library MSVCR100.dll'
Please help as I am able to run the original boxplorer with no problems. Thank you.

I compiled that binary using the free Visual C++ 10.
You probably need
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=a7b7a05e-6de6-4d3a-a423-37bf0912db84
Let me know if that helps, i'll add a note with the download.

Or, if you have a Visual C++ installed, try compiling a local version?

I spent some time this weekend trying to get the iz3d driver to play nice with the Zalman display and offer quad-buffer opengl for me to test with.

No dice.

Latest version of that driver seems obsessed with directx and skips opengl options entirely but even then I couldn't get anything useful out of it for say Google Earth in directx mode.

Things got pretty unstable to the point i had to dig up a PS/2 keyboard to get windows to boot into safe mode and uninstall the cruft.

Since this experience is so terrible, it might be possible to find Zalman displays for cheap on ebay  :-\

Meanwhile, with boxplorer I display interlaced stereoscopic natively. Much less hassle. Still recommend the Zalman as secondary display for viewing stereoscopic content. Comes with a decent 3d video player etc.

All I really wanted was play ioquake3 in 3d  ;D

 ;D Yes the free visual C++ 10 did help. Now I got Boxplorer 2 to work. Thank you.

I added a sort of real-time depth of field rendering option to control high frequency rendering noise in the distance.

The approach I took is to render to texture with z stuck in the alpha channel, mipmap and then draw the texture covering the entire screen, using a shader that reads the alpha from top level pixel and then picks a mipmapped pixel depending on the alpha value. With some parameter tweaking it actually does not look as bad as it sounds  ;D

Source at http://code.google.com/p/boxplorer2

Haven't tested on Linux or Mac yet, so I might be violating some opengl or shader fu across the board..

I'm not sure where this collaboration is heading. I'm interested in participating, there are many issues in this discussion thread.
One of the main problems I have is with the Video drivers I have tried here, it keeps interfering with Windows 7 or is it my NVIDIA gpu configuration?

Rrrola is missing in action at the moment? I forked and put code up at code.google.com/p/boxplorer2, as noted.

My main machine is i7 windows7-64 with amd 5850. Pretty solid for this stuff. Impressed actually, since with all my trial and error development, it never acted up.
I also tried boxplorer2 on a recent snow leopard iMac 27", amd chipset, worked well. And compile and test run a bit on ubuntu w/ nVidia 7600 GT (which probably emulates a bunch of the shaders in sw? pretty slow).

Boxplorer is all about the interactivity, and _much_ more enjoyable with a spiffy graphics card. Pretty unusable with an old one,  since everything is tied around the render loop and things become very unresponsive once frame rate drops below 1 fps.
How well the rest of your system keeps responding depends on OS and drivers.

What nvdia setup do you use? With most recent drivers, I presume?

There was a discussion at the Nvidia forums that some problems were occurring with some of their latest drivers. Its not always easy to mess with what works just to try something new. I learned a long time ago its better to experiment on a second computer system.
regardless: here is my partial Nvidia display control panel

driver: 190.38
os: win 7 64 bit
dx: 11.0
GeForce 8800 gt

p.s. I can identify why a person might sometimes go missing, it sometimes has to do with his or her partner, ... in my case its sometimes my wife  :police:

Some searching suggests that driver is from 2009.07.21. Surely they have some updates?

The card specs suggest it could be a modest performer but getting a bit long in the tooth?
Perhaps others on this board know first hand? There are some other gpu viewers posted on this board; mandelflyer and fragmentarium come to mind. How do those fare?

Looks very nice. But i dont know how to get that to run. Can u post a Version whit EXE Datei please.
And would be nice to hat a Lodsystem in this Engine.

you can find it here (windows 32 bit)>http://code.google.com/p/boxplorer2/downloads/detail?name=win32-2.00.zip&can=2&q=
I also have a version for mac OS 10.5..

THank you, but dont work. "invalid_parameter_noinfo_noreturn in msvcr100.dll not found"  :hmh:

Maybe the 32bit? I hav 64.

....ok i used it on 32bit system and the same error.

I downloaded the c++thing äh "vcredistx86" but it dont worked.

Question: for the same number of iterations and level of details, how much faster is the parallel processing of a fast GPU? 80 times faster?

i would love to visit this one on boxplorer:
http://theli-at.deviantart.com/art/Kleinian-drops-192676501

Not sure what the speedup is. A lot though. But the renderings aren't exactly comparable. Lower quality lighting, ambient-occlusion, depth of field etc. A decent DE is very important for performance so if raystep multiplier needs to be really small to avoid overshoot, the formula is not going to fly.

Once a formula drops below a couple of frames per second I lose interest quickly :-\

I could try code up a fragment.glsl for that hybrid, but i haven't paid too much attention to the various tweaks in composing the hybrids. Do you know what the composite formula is for that render?

I'll drop a recent win32 build on code.google.com when I get around to it, one that includes the DoF hack.

i see.

Same here, anything algorythmic 3d @ 25fps i love. Do you mean that the lighting and the shadows have a fixed mesh size and have less resolution? not raytraced?

I was wandering what DE is?

You are too nice! ...i was just joking about seeing the exact render in the image, i think that is probably magnified *50. it is gorgeous but i think it would be a distraction from the organised development list that you have already, with more formulas and visual tweaks... If ever it can handle some varied hybrids etc, that would be more than i wish for. Actually, i dont have a fast GFX at the moment, 1fps @ 320pxl fullscreen. (radeon from 1997 inspiron laptop). am checking out some PC's this very moment!

I kindof wondered if it could be possible to section a small part of a formula and explore in zoom mode,
i.e. instead of map = X,Y,Z, between -1,1
map = X,Y,Z between -0.6, -0,5

so that the total render field would be one thousandth of the volume... just curious in theory what that would mean.

I wonder where Rrola is? I think he may be on holiday, but also i suspect that it must be hard for him handing his masterpiece to open source and seeing it taken in all different directions that he wasnt expecting. he may have had an aneurism and joined hari krishna, that would be i would do if i had a program that good.  Thanks Rrolo, that is engenuous.


It is fantastic to see that it is advancing! very clever stuff i wish my maths and coding was up to it!

the image is from this page of formulas abotu 20 images from the top.
http://www.google.co.uk/images?rlz=1T4SKPT_enFR413FR413&q=mandelbulb3dv16%7B&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi&biw=1436&bih=809

@navi:
grab the .dll and put it inside .exe's folder..
@ant123:
see > http://blog.hvidtfeldts.net/index.php/2011/02/gpu-versus-cpu-for-pixel-graphics/

Thx. :) I made a lot of tests, but i cant get it to run.

same also on windows xp sp3, installed msvcp and msvcr files but got this message:

unable to locate procedure entry point in msvcr100, even if i fixed it i am sure there would still be dozens of other things.

@navi/ant123:  :hmh:
is it ok your Gpu and drivers? can you run this one > http://www.subblue.com/projects/mandelbulb ? or this other > http://syntopia.github.com/Fragmentarium/ ? what about upgrading the operating system? and did you download all the components, like c++ stuff, sdl, etc.. ?
try with the original boxplorer here >http://sourceforge.net/projects/boxplorer/
maybe there's something (like a .dll) missing..you could use this tool 2 find out if there are missing dependencies > http://www.dependencywalker.com/
 
an alternative is 2 compile the software on your machine..

Thx the original Boxplorer works fine. Its a very nice Programm. :)

I just tried this last night on a clean XP machine.
After installing http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=a7b7a05e-6de6-4d3a-a423-37bf0912db84
it starts up fine and from there on it's all about the graphics card & drivers.. Not sure what's up with your machine's configuration?
If i get around to it, i'll compile a version w/ visual c++ 2005 or 2008, perhaps that'll easy the pain.

Like visual says, if you have a compiler and some inclination, try compile it yourself on the target machine.

"@mariushi, thanks i installed that redistributable file... same message. dont worry! the number 1 works enough for a sneak peek ( i think i had to install 1 2 extra dll's for 1..)  and my gfx is too slow i just get a few fps. i have to wait till i can borrow a gamer pc.

i wonder if there are any gfx based 2d mendelbrot set programs that can animate zooms in realtime, like e-999 power zooms... except that 1 frame at e999 probably takes even a graphics card 2 minutes!

@navi
the syntopia article... thanks! i have coded a bit of sse4 so i put a comment on there i dunno if he posted it.

Interesting program, looks like it could have potential: http://syntopia.github.com/Fragmentarium/
It also has a tendency to crash my GPU video driver sometimes. I'm somewhat hesitant to experiment with new drivers
which could cause issues with other installed programs. I'm almost tempted to clone an older HDD, and run the Boxplorer
experiment, along with Fragmentarium only.

oh i didnt realise that all had to do was recompile it.

point me to a easy compiler and the code and i will get round to it sometime.

Excellent work on this program everyone, Boxplorer is my favorite fractal rendering program I've encountered so far  :D !!! I just finished downloaded a ton of different stuff off of the google.code upload for boxplorer2 and I just cannot get it to compile for the life of me. I'm on OS X 10.6.6 and this is the error message I'm getting:

boxplorer : failed to open 'boxplorer.cfg'
Usage: boxplorer <configuration-file.cfg>logout

I don't know what I'm doing wrong as everything seems to be in order. Any help with this would be awesome cause I'm loving boxplorer and really want to check out this new version.

Excellent work though, this is some awesome software  :D !

Did you compile or just download? Anyways, seems you have an executable that could run.
But you are trying to run it directly from finder?

It is a console executable so launch it from within a terminal session (applications/utilities/terminal)

In terminal, goto the directory that contains the executable and the cfgs/ subdirectory.

Now try 'boxplorer cfgs/boxplorer.cfg'.

Yeah I am trying to run it from the finder. I'm not familiar with Macs, my mom just has one with an Intel i5 CPU which is why I'm using it. Who do I bring the terminal to the folder like in cmd prompt? I dragged the folder into the terminal window and then added the extension to run the exec but it's giving me a 'No such file or directory' output. Sorry if these questions are redundant, I just have no idea what's good with these Macs.

****EDIT: Nope, figured it out, just had to include the .cfg file too. Thanks very much Marius, it is up and running all well now  ;D!

I have a question: is the depth of field feature included in the 2.01 version of the program? Because I can't seem to find how to enable it.

Regardless, amazing program!

Yeah, the 2.01 binaries have it compiled in. Not all .cfg files have it enabled (look for 'enable_dof 1').
You can specify --enabledof as extra argument on the commandline to force it on, which enables the related variables in the UI and then tweak away.

It doesn't seem to work on all videocards / drivers (macs are notorious, works fine on win7-64 w/ radeon).
But probably some bad opengl fu on my part (i.e. bug). If anyone has experience with render to buffer with automipmapping across various boards and SDL, please have a look at initGraphics() in boxplorer.cc

For those situations where your driver / card is unhappy about it, you can add --disabledof on the commandline, overriding the value that is in the .cfg

Regardless, the DoF rendering is a bit of a hack using mipmaps and custom shading. Certainly not accurate nor a nice bokeh, but fast ;-)

Time to wake up this thread  :evil1:. Here are attached some shaders. Hope you'll like them (pretty sure you'll do ;D).

Bump! ;D

eh.. what can i say-I'm speachless!!
 :o
:thumbsup1:

 ;D
Don't get lost.
Syntopia Already did something similar to the RT Theli's Kleinian drops. Waiting for his next release of fragmentarium.

Sweet shaders! Love those Kleinians.  :beer: :beer:
I tweaked the shaders to work w/ boxplorer2 and my ATI card and added the cfgs to http://code.google.com/p/boxplorer2

Could still use some attention with respect to param tweaking and mapping to AntTweakBar..

Thanks :)

Here's a sequence rendered using a mutant of your Pkleinian shader

Watch on youtube for 3d playback options!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZRZ7KNsx9U (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZRZ7KNsx9U)

And another one. With reflections this time thanks to knighty.
Watch on youtube for proper 3D playback!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0ilmEcsj8c

Now available on the Google Code site (https://code.google.com/p/boxplorer2/) :) Supposed to work with the Radeon HD 6000 series or newer.

What is your hardware setup Marius ?

At the moment 2x7970 at 1.1GHz. A bit excessive, perhaps?  ;D

But the simple shaders like low iter menger / mandelbox ran quite zippy on my earlier 5850 back in 2010.

Lol that explains how you was able to do such an incredible video by just screen recording ;)

...and nVidia Titan.