Love it - great work. It explores that wonderful zone between repetition of detail, and variety of shape. Also, in this one you can see slightly 'deeper' into each crater compared to your similar works.
thanks
one issue with 3d fractals is that it can be difficult to find a good camera angle (it's also difficult for me because i have no realtime preview functionality, and have to edit the camera params in code). if i put the camera low, then the image becomes really flat but you get stronger depth of field effects; if i put it quite high up then the fractal becomes nearly 2d again.
after my exams are over i'll be re-writing my intersection routines to work with general linear ifs fractals. i expect it to be a lot faster, much more numerically robust, and above all a lot more interesting: the family of fractals with which i'm currently working are either completely flat or nearly spherical.
another member of fractalforums (and deviantart), david makin, has been working on this and has some really encouraging results! check out this fractal:
http://makinmagic.deviantart.com/art/Julia-Rock-67422646As usual, I'd die to zoom into that, and/or fly along the surface.
i hope you've viewed the 1920x1200 fullsize image at deviantart
i'm currently rendering a 5120x3200 resolution image for a medium-sized print, and man is it taking forever... even with my recently upgraded computer (12ghz of cpu power) running for days, it's still not quite clean enough.
so, given how much it's punishing 12ghz just for a single image, i doubt it'll be realtime anytime soon
well, at least at this level of detail/quality; i've got full global illumination via metropolis light transport in there, as described by veach in his thesis:
http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/veach_thesis/. it should, however, be possible to do some realtime flying around without the fancy light transport, especially once i've worked out the new fractal algorithm.
stay tuned for cool things once my exams are finally over!
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