Hi everybody
Last friday a friend of mine was talking about ray marching, the Mandelbulb and programming his own 3D fractal engine. He also challenged me to do the same... So I picked it up and set to work on my own 3D (CPU only) ray marching fractal engine in Java. It was a very steep learning curve for a programmer with limited math knowledge, but I'm pretty pleased with the first results!
On sunday I had the first things ready, lighting (Blinn-Phong), soft shadows, but still I had no perspective build on (all rays travelled in the same direction) and I had no way to change the view point/camera position:
Next step was to render something other than spheres and cubes, and get the camera position under control, that breakthrough came monday evening:
My first mandelbulb! But the perspective is still flat and it misses detail. So I made some more improvements and managed to render a nice wallpaper for myself:
Today I've been playing around with optimizing the code a little bit (less memory usage, already twice as fast as it was, but still slow). And I've added some glow and the ability to add 'distance fog'.
Also I've recorded my first movie, just to show some moving fractals:
http://www.youtube.com/v/r&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1(yes, it has a glitch with the pink mandelbulb, can't be bothered to fix...)I'm not sure what I want to do next with the code, maybe I'll try some innovative rendering idea that the friend I mentioned earlier is working on.
All comments are more than welcome!
Roy