Suggestions for a renderer to explore a 3D density function (voxels)

[snickell]

I have a dense 3D IFS that I'd like to explore. It produces a "density" at each point in 3D, essentially opacity voxels.

Here's a really poor 3D rendering using a program designed for 3d medical data (cat scans, etc):
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5048927/3d-ifs-osirix-render.png

Here's a movie where the 3rd dimension is mapped to time (panning through one rendering):
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5048927/3d-ifs.mp4

I was wondering if somebody could suggest a renderer program/framework for getting a good rendering of this done, to start to understand the properties of this space. I've currently implemented the IFS's density(x,y,z) function in both python and GLSL, but I don't know enough about 3d rendering to write my own raymarcher in GLSL. Ideally I'd really like to explore the IFS in semi-realtime using a GPU rendering, but high quality is important as an option.

I'd be happy outputting 3D data in any sane file format for which a suitable high quality renderer was available.

-Seth

[phtolo]

Fragmentarium would be my suggestion.
I don't know of any programs that lets you explore transparent objects of the bat, instead you could try the following:

Look at Examples - Tutorials - 26 3D fractals without a DE.frag
You need to add a slider for what opacity level and change the bool inside(vec3 pos) function to your density function with a check of the opacity-level.

[Patryk Kizny]

What voxel format you currently output to?
If you're on openVDB, you could try using industry VFX tools - like houdini. It has a free apprentice version these days.

If you can save to ASCII pointcloud (XYZ + RGBABC) where ABC are arbitrary properties (color, density, reflectance etc…) the best renderer for that would be Krakatoa.
You can run it as a standalone or plugin to majority of 3D software out there. Krakatoa handles easily massive datasets. I was rendering about 1 000 000 000 points dataset at a regular workstation.

[3dickulus]

http://www.fractalforums.com/fragmentarium/generating-wave-front-obj-files-from-exr-voxel-cube/

just now tinkering with a renderer/converter that takes an EXR slice stack and outputs a .obj (wavefront) file or .pcd (point cloud data) file