Mandelbox 'speed render'

[khyperia]

My own program, C#/XNA/HLSL. Time to render: 3 minutes. You heard me right, three minutes for this entire video, rendering about seven frames per second, even on my rather terrible machine!
It was originally 480p, but youtube decided to downgrade to 360p.
Reason for the poor quality is that I was going for a speed render, so to speak, see how fast I could crank out a video. I also only started rendering stuff about 4 months ago, so I don't know all the fancy rendering techniques to make something look good (critique/advice/tips are appreciated).
Fudge. Best video title.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/n-qLj7UmKAk&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/n-qLj7UmKAk&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1</a>

I remember one person saying their video took 45 seconds/frame, this one took 0.15 seconds/frame. Granted, the other one was pretty high quality, but mine going at 1080p with all settings up still only takes about 2 seconds/frame.
GPU programming is a winner.

[cKleinhuis]

smooth camera path, nice object ... but ... awful colors ..
do you own a double precision card ?!

[eiffie]

Nice to see more GPU programmers here. I've been rendering for a year and still don't know how to make stuff "look good". Thats what makes it art. It wouldn't be as fun if it were just programming. If your looking for the next challenge try reflections/refractions/emissive materials or finding the next "mandelbox/mandelbulb". I look forward to seeing more from you.

[khyperia]

smooth camera path, nice object ... but ... awful colors ..
do you own a double precision card ?!

Camera path is just a catmull-rom spline between "keyframe" points (I do separate splines on position, lookat, and up vectors), -1.7ish mandelbox, pretty unoriginal, and I know, colors were just slopped together, its a interpolation of raw red, green, and blue using some random parameters.
And nope, no double precision (I think), just a standard, crappy video card. *checks specs* ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4200 Series, in a $300 Compaq Presario CQ56 laptop. A $300 laptop. Yeah. I don't know why people don't use the gpu more.

Nice to see more GPU programmers here. I've been rendering for a year and still don't know how to make stuff "look good". Thats what makes it art. It wouldn't be as fun if it were just programming. If your looking for the next challenge try reflections/refractions/emissive materials or finding the next "mandelbox/mandelbulb". I look forward to seeing more from you.

Reflections/etc sound fun, I'll have to look into that. I know those types of things seriously boost render time, as for 1x reflections you double the amount of rays shot, which basically doubles render time.

[eiffie]

You see I'm try to coax you away from real-time One of the reasons there aren't more great fractal programs based on GPUs is that their strength is seen as real-time animation but really they are good at almost all graphics tasks.
I would say on average adding those elements slows my scripts down 4 or 5x. So you are talking 15 minutes instead of 3! Aren't we worth 12 minutes of your computers time? - lol.

[khyperia]

Here's a 17 second video that I just made, as a quick test of my completely new, from scratch program.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/PYsRfikYvcE&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/PYsRfikYvcE&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1</a>