Mutatorkammer Beta

[cKleinhuis]

oh my god, Continuous Levels of Detail for Height Fields is a pain in the ass programming

but you are right, patches closer to the viewer should be rendered at a finer resolution, i was just playing around
today, next thing will be the generation of normals for lighting (uargh i do not like 3d because 3 dimensions make
everything sooooooooooo complicated )  ... as mentioned above, the shadow calculation will take some more time

i am thinking about a RENDER mode and a REALTIME mode, in the realtime mode, you would just see the displacement
mapped plane like in the first posting, when in RENDER mode, the black areas around the plane will get filled,


the thing with the zooming is more simple than you think, check out this movie
http://fractalmovies.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=21&func=fileinfo&id=11
i made 5 years ago, it is just a heightmap rendering of a 2d zoomed mandelbrot animation, but the
effect is like you are flying around, this is the way it would look like

[lycium]

yeah, making the caching thing continuous would indeed be horrible. as for normals, that's fortunately really simple see eg. http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article2264.asp

btw i've also written a fractal heightmap renderer, with (real, area-light) soft shadows and reflections and all the rest of it, but it was quite slow even after some sse optimisation, so i kinda forgot about it. i still have some renders though: http://fractographer.com/wip/softshadows.png

[cKleinhuis]

lol,  thx too bad, it hasn't, but the current version features quite stable formula parsing and breeding, the 3d version will take some weeks until i release them to the public, it is a whole lot of properties i have to deal with ( eye pos, camera pos, light pos, fog ... ) the pictures above just show my first steps, next i have to clean up my code a little bit for calculating the normals so that simple lighting effect are possible

i will keep you all informed here 

[cKleinhuis]

yeah, making the caching thing continuous would indeed be horrible. as for normals, that's fortunately really simple see eg. http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article2264.asp

i am not after realtime at all, a fast preview mode for rendering, and if you do not move, the picture refines ...

yes, normals are simple, but either way, it has to be done at this time i render the complete view with patches, so i have
to take care of the border patches for smoothing and normalization

btw i've also written a fractal heightmap renderer, with (real, area-light) soft shadows and reflections and all the rest of it, but it was quite slow even after some sse optimisation, so i kinda forgot about it. i still have some renders though: http://fractographer.com/wip/softshadows.png

hey, cool one, you are quite busy doing rendering stuff

but i know that rendering of a decent 3d fractal image will take much time, but it s worth it, especially the ever increasing detail



have you rendered quaternions yet ?
as i told above, i am planing to render animations as quaternions

basically each frame of an animation becomes a slice of the quaternion, perhaps i will render it slice by slice
or i will use some isocontouring algorithms to create real 3d objects out of them, for lighting and shadow
or i have to implement a whole volume rendering method for that (using alpha channel )
but i am quite unsure how and when i will do it

[lycium]

but i know that rendering of a decent 3d fractal image will take much time, but it s worth it, especially the ever increasing detail

i hope my friend aexion won't mind my pimping his deviantart address here: http://aexion.deviantart.com

he has an amazing gallery of 3d works, and plans to go commercial with his application. we're working together on it (there's a very natural work split) but things are kinda slow with Real World (tm) stuff atmo...

have you rendered quaternions yet ?

actually not but i can probably do volume rendering of a quaternion julia in realtime, with or without gpu

as i told above, i am planing to render animations as quaternions

these things are fun for a while, but you're surely aware (since you wrote something like mutatorkammer) that the real excitement comes from the search and discovery aspect of fractals, not from what people have done before.

then again, people have done very interesting things: http://graphics.cs.uiuc.edu/~jch/papers/diss.pdf


anyway, good antialiased rendering of quaternion julias poses its own (very instructive) set of difficulties and is certainly worthwhile looking forward to the pix!

[ericbigas]

i hope my friend aexion won't mind my pimping his deviantart address here: http://aexion.deviantart.com

he has an amazing gallery of 3d works, and plans to go commercial with his application. we're working together on it (there's a very natural work split) but things are kinda slow with Real World (tm) stuff atmo...

Great stuff there.  Will the new app do animations?

[lycium]

it's a bit early to be talking about big features like that, but since aex and i have both made animations before i don't see why not (eventually). besides, this thread is about your app i linked aex's page because i think it's a good example of unique + interesting 3d fractals.

[cKleinhuis]

*excuse*

damn it, this is so fluffing sharp rendering,

this image just looks like an heightmap rendering, even if i dunno how to make it THAT SHARP !
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/49835302/

and here i am curios ...WHAT IS IT? it can't be just a heightmap
is it a quaternion ?!?!? what the heck is it ?
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/48727116/


if i see stuff like this, i am getting quite depressed
but this is absolutely amazing stuff you make there, WOAH!

i qm realy kinda jealous about the sharp rendering WITH lightings and shadows ... so let's see how far i can make it

[cKleinhuis]

as i told above, i am planing to render animations as quaternions Wink

these things are fun for a while, but you're surely aware (since you wrote something like mutatorkammer) that the real excitement comes from the search and discovery aspect of fractals, not from what people have done before.

hey, i wrote that i want to render animations as quaternions, not quaternions as animations !
i think this has never done before 

ok, to be clear, usual quaternion renderings is kinda rendering an animation of a certain formula ( slices ) ,
but those quaternion renders are to restricted on to a special formula with a special parameter,

with mutatorkammer i want to interpret any animation as the slices of a quaternion, and render it
but as i told i do not know how to make that sharp looking raytracing like results ...

i think i have to take a look at this http://graphics.cs.uiuc.edu/~jch/papers/diss.pdf

[lycium]

this image just looks like an heightmap rendering, even if i dunno how to make it THAT SHARP !

the bulk of my involvement with aexion is improving the rendering of his fractal creations and my own derivative works... although his 3d fractal renderer supports shadows where my one doesn't, the rendering quality and speed in my app is greatly improved. and i'm not really in a hurry to add shadows to that either (taking the xenodream approach), since you hit a brick wall with that method pretty quickly in terms of the realism you can attain after i've gotten my various work and studying obligations in order (and aex has returned from visiting his family) work will begin on the next generation renderers for his commercial application. the 2d stuff i've been doing is the tip of a really big iceberg

oh and i should also say that besides the sophisticated sampling in my old 3d fractal renderer (produced for example http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/43955493/) aexion has been disadvantaged by his older computer.

is it a quaternion ?!?!? what the heck is it ?

i spent much of 2006 learning just a tiny fraction of aexion's fractal collection. he's been doing fractals for many many years and has tried basically everything... not only am i not in a position to blabber about his method in this instance (commercially i'm just the rendering monkey, he'll provide most of the "fractalness" and design the application), but that also puts me on the wrong foot for the millions of questions that will follow - i know because i have asked them myself! bear in mind there's a lot of talk about commercial stuff around these forums

i qm realy kinda jealous about the sharp rendering WITH lightings and shadows ... so let's see how far i can make it

i have dedicated my life to high quality rendering, and must say i don't regret it

[lycium]

How was it rendered?  Is he using OpenGL, DX or something else?

he used to use opengl at a pretty low level, and eventually/begrudgingly switched to pure c++

[lycium]

-full MultiThreading support
-speed improvements

it's still quite slow, and not multithreaded: http://www.fractographer.com/propaganda/notmthreaded.png

[cKleinhuis]

thx for info, i will see what i can do about it

you have 2 processors ?

 at this time only each window uses a thread to manage rendering its
content i know i am not using threads properly i will try to improve them

[lycium]

a dualcore (amd 4400+ x2) cpu, yes.

a good+simple approach to threading is to have a <i>thread pool</i> where a bunch of created threads hang around (in a stopped state) to be given work. thread creation, sync and termination is expensive, so one tries to minimize that (just like opengl state setting); for your preview palette you can dish out work to the slave threads in the pool from a master thread, then WaitForMultipleObjects on them. more info: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms687055.aspx

good multithreading can be very difficult unfortunately

[cKleinhuis]

thank you, i surely have to rework it, at the moment i am happy that i do not block the whole system anymore :