Welcome to Fractal Forums

I've posted the first in a series of Mandelbulb 3D video tutorials. They are casual screencasts where I show how I use M3D to great images and animations. Not too technical and aimed at beginners or those who are intimidated by all the options, buttons, and sliders. I will try and pass on some tips and tricks for more advanced users in the later episodes.

Feedback would be appreciated - comments, suggestions, ideas, or tips to include in future installments.

Part 1 is a quick 10 minute overview and explanation of basic functions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClrPgjIS5pg

Part 2 is about the basic workflow. I load a preset, change a few params, move around the 3D space, and produce a detailed render.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZFXL1OjYiA

Part 3  covers most of the color options
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igE0NShMoQU

Part 4 covers lighting
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sq7sI9FOCoU

Part 5 basic animation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R541WIqM9oI

Part 6 Voxel Stack to 3D mesh
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kpu-DZs9HXU

Hi Don,
Cant believe im the first person watching your youtube video right now...im a beginner and im sure your video will help me a lot..on behalf of the world, thanks a lot for this precious gift of yours!!

cuakgiler

Thanks caukgiler. I hope these give you a headstart while fiddling with M3D. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with. Should have the next episode posted tomorrow.

Nice :) ... Don't mind if I steal some of your stuff for my blog tutorial do ya? ;D

My problem right now is time. I see it hasn't changed much since my teenage IRC and MUD-playing days - real life is still annoying as hell sometimes. Except now I have much more serious issues to deal with!. Anyway, off-topic!

Thanks for posting these. I won't copy anything directly, will rather learn from them and then do my own interpretations :)

Please let me know what you think of my Tutorial so far. I've got as far as formulas. Still so much to explore!

JodyVL: Please do use any info that you think is worth sharing. I'll def. take a look at your tutorial and give it a mention in my next vid. Always good to have multiple sources of help. :)

Thanks Don :beer:... I forgot to give you a link: http://mandelubber.blogspot.com/p/tutorials.html (http://mandelubber.blogspot.com/p/tutorials.html)

I've certainly already learnt a thing or two from you... Need to go do some modifications now :)

Thank You very much, Don Whitaker! Looking forward impatiently to watching further tutorials!
With kindest regards,
Sfumato.

*** Update ***

Jesse has added a new feature to M3D that allows for a much cleaner and easier creation of 3D meshes. Check out this thread:  http://www.fractalforums.com/mandelbulb-3d/voxel-image-stack-and-then-what/

This method will still work, but I would suggest trying the Voxel Stacks first. They rock!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kpu-DZs9HXU


I've posted a video tutorial showing how to mash up a couple of free tools and create textured, 3D meshes from Mandelbulb 3D images.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jfdargqyglc

The basic trick is to use an app from Autodesk called Photofly Autodesk 123D Catch. It takes properly prepared photos and turns them into 3D mesh data - does a pretty darn good job too. But using stuff how it was meant to be used is no fun, so were gonna take pictures of things that don't exist. :) I also show how to use MeshLab to clean up the generated mesh so it'll play nice with your 3D apps.

Great! 3D fractal meshes at last! Well done! Thanks Don! Will give it a try!

Cool, Power 8, love to see what you come up with.

I've posted another short video that shows a few examples of the meshes I've come up with using this method.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxCLT5-GHHI

Didn't see the vid but surely this will interest hordes of people; set as sticky! :D

Sounds too good to be true... Hope it is not too much "rocket science"...  O0
Thank you for the info Don!

I just tried it out and it works quite well, thanks for the tutorial ;D

Cool, BrutalToad, glad it worked for you.

It's certainly not perfect but it's definitely a fun way to create some interesting shapes. I've shifted directions on a small game I'm making - using some M3D generated terrains for alien landscapes.

(https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-kcaIVZ4Xnag/Tm0afv94sSI/AAAAAAAACPk/31dYJ1RqNaI/s1024/Unity%2B2011-09-11%2B13-22-16-77.jpg)

This is great! I was wondering how to make 3d meshes of mandelbulb fractals because I want to try and make some 3D prints of some juliabulbs.
Thank you very much for the tutorial!

Well thank you for these great tutorials, I hope to see some more soon from you!

I loved your one on the lighting.
Here is my first stab at using lighting for coloring [I also used a Apophysis Fractal and Photoshop image for the backround]
http://www.flickr.com/photos/xenas_images/6385310333/in/photostream/

Bravo! I have recently been brainstorming the exact same technique, but I had not thought to disconnect the light from the camera. Meshlab makes the poly quite useable. I can't wait to bring these into Maya, animate them with deformers, and project them onto the dome!

I may have missed this detail in the video, but what resolution do you render each frame at?

Isosceles: I rendered most of the frames at 1280x720 and acouple at around 2 megapixels. Much larger than that I was having trouble uploading and processing it all.

Is there a way to downsize a voxelstack rendering to get antialiasing?

"Aliasing" is inherent to voxel volumes no matter how smooth your images are and eliminating it requires post processing of the resulting meshes. The laplacian filters in Remesh or Meshlab are the best I have found so far for that as they nicely eliminate the stairs aspect of the meshes while keeping a good amount of detail and don't increase the polygon count.

Thanks for the tip !  :dink:

Great tutorial. Can't wait to get stuck in..Many thanks. O0

moved it to "tutorials" and set sticky

Hi Don!
I just wanted to post a small (huuge!) Thank You!
These tutorials where just what I was looking for, after loosing faith that I will ever understand a fraction of Mandelbulb 3d.
I highly appreciate your work!
The videos are very well done and greatly helped me with my first steps.

Thank you!

Hi,
thanks for the tutorials. Here ist my 1st try with voxel slices. I also used 3dsmax and maya for mesh cleaning and textured and rendered it with vue. So I got this fractal crater landscape with buildings and vehicles :)

http://vimeo.com/56594660

The result video is followed by a making of.

The good thing is: It works.
The bad thing: Because of the baked geometry (fix polygon resolution), it is not usefull for large camera zooms.
And because of the high polycount and the unclean result after mesh reduction it took too much time optimizing and cleaning the geometry by hand.

So as result of that, the next time I'll try it with a 3D camera tracker and see if this can be combined efficiently with other 3d software. Or maybe one day I'll have the time to get familiar with ZBrush.

Note: There is a mistake in the making of. Finally I used  768 instead of 1024.

Great work!
I use camera tracker with fractals in ae, work fine. I will show later.
@destiny, M3d/Utilites/voxelstack.

thanks a million for posting these Don..

Hi,
I was able to make some clips in multiple parts see for example http://fractalbeke.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d5ov2vw.
Suddenly I have a problem. I can no longer made the second part of a clip. The first part is always O.K. and when I start the rendering of the second part, only ONE JPG is done.
Any idea why that happens ? If yes, my e-mail addres is : bvdk1@telenet.be.

Sorry for my bad English !

Have you ever heard stories of "kid" somewhere who never tasted ice cream,chocolate, etc ( somethig we take for granted ) especially in the USA and that first time they can't get enough... Well, that's the way I am w/ fractal art especially "3D" Can't Get Enough ! :o

thanks Don!

 From a fellow fractal enthusiast, I want to say a huge (belated) thanks for these tutes, Don. I learnt lots from your videos, and I have posted a couple of basic animations that I have come up with so far. Although they aren't overly complicated I wanted to show a couple of the basic things that you can do.

I've been getting familiar with the program for a while now but still have lots to learn, and would like to offer a couple of things that I put in my animations, although I was abit slow to post. Firstly, I seem to find the Julia sets from the Abox can be more useful for investigations, and there appear to be a relationship between where you select it from and which particular features dominate the overall set. But usually you'll get a layer region, and then a more "open space" where you can find cool looking details to fly around -

 Already you can see in some of the video animations that you can get some really cool efects in animations by varying the parameters of the fractal /during/ the animation, and of course even if you don't, at least choosing a few different orientations of your viewpoint using the keys in the 3D navigator to get slewing, rotating and yawing at various keyframes can give a sense of flying through the fractal. It is important to think about the path you are taking and it does take a few goes to get the hang of it.
 One watchout I found when generating longer animations is that the default for the animator is to overwrite the existing frames, but if you are like me and come back to extend a flight from an earlier path, if you have stored the renders from the existing flythrough, you only need to generate the later frames, it can save a bit of time. However, this can sometimes lead to what appears to be a stutter sometimes, so YMMV, and if you have a fast enough computer it isn't so important.

 Finally, I wanted to post something that shows a few points worthy of looking around, so my anims so far are pretty short and basic in nature. But eventually it would be nice to put together something that uses the DOF and stuff, lighting and make a nice atmospheric soundtrack to go with it.
its on my utube: (how do you imprt it into a message?)
 www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7ojtAcVNH8
 I'm really grateful to everyone who helped make these great fractal programs and their inspirational images and animations.

Thanks for all this tutorial.. !

Damn it, just ONE word (in fact three) "First Person Shooter" and you have saved my fraktal addiction.
I have finally understood how to rotate my model.... now I will be able to convert it in 3D textured models.

I am planning to print them on a color 3D printer I have at my work, so if you have good aim or 3D model to show me, I am on.

Again thanks.

Really thanks for this awesome video tutorial series *applause*

This tutorial by Nic022 looks great, he is a pro at those things.

-> http://fav.me/d5rkq28