My mandelbulb experience.

[eq]

Hi all!
My first post here so I'd like to thank all you guys here for peaking my interest in this 3d monster.

After seeing some of the images in this forum I just knew that I had to create my own renderer.
It's still very much work in progress and there are still many points on my wishlist, but I though I'd share some of my stuff.

I kick of with some (now quite old) high resolution renders:

http://www.solidicon.se/eq/mb/Alien_12288x6912.jpg


http://www.solidicon.se/eq/mb/Alien2_12288x6912.jpg

The originals are all saved as 16 bit per channel (48 bits per pixel) .png files with an output gamma of 1.8.
Everything is shaded using floating point precision.
The lighting has a soft directional light source (sun) + hemisphere lighting (i.e "real" ambient occlusion).

After rendering those I added a simple tone mapper and "infinite" reflections (well I've used five at most).
Here're some images to show of these new features better in their original .png format:

http://www.solidicon.se/eq/mb/BlackMetal_1280x1024.png


http://www.solidicon.se/eq/mb/FerrariBrot_1280x800.png

Recently I've added a glow effect as well as multiple material support.
I did some renderings with a simple material selection heuristic and got these images:

http://www.solidicon.se/eq/mb/Landscape_2560x1600.jpg


http://www.solidicon.se/eq/mb/Landscape2_2560x1600.jpg


http://www.solidicon.se/eq/mb/Landscape_1280x800.png

All rendering, shading, tracing, post processing etc is done on the GPU (shader model 3.0).
My application allows for real time free flying in preview mode (no reflection, single shadow ray etc).
All parameters can be tweaked in real time as well.
The main rendering is done by rendering small tiles, hence I have no (or almost anyway) restriction on image size.
The rendering system features an adaptive anti-aliasing system which improves rendering speed a lot for "smooth" areas such as the sky.

Rendering times for the above images ranges from minutes to ~40 hours (using a midrange consumer GPU).
The bigger images used a total of ~67 billion samples (each sample makes a number of ray casts) and the simpler maybe about 64 samples per pixel.

Anyway keep up the good work!
I'll try to post any improvements that I make.

Cheers
/Eq

[Melancholyman]

I have to say that the images featuring the red and black "blobs" are simply 

[cKleinhuis]

 

[bib]

cool great job!

[KRAFTWERK]

Beautiful!

[subblue]

Very impressive. Great stuff