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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:

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

 

I've now got the 'fog' and 'glow' working, another 1920x1080 wallpaper render (takes about 10 minutes to render):



Next to add will probably be multiple pass rendering, I'm not entirely sure how it works, but I've got some idea to implement.

Wow just wow, very impressive work my friend, I could never do what you did, are you like an alian from another planet, is like everyone on this forum a genus but me? 

Welcome to the forum and really look forward to reading your threads, I'll be honest, I know only a little about this stuff but it feels instinctive and right

be quite sure, we do cook just with water, as he is doing by plainly raymarching a bulb, it is the enthusiasm that counts!
do whatever you like, do it with enthusiasm, and other people will believe you are a genious as well