Hi all, I found that meshing mandelbulbs was fun to program because it's a geometry puzzle, so I wrote an app that can do a variety meshing tasks, and then I ran out of steam in april. I'll upload the most recent build from april...
For the moment i'll guid you through one of easier options the program can do...
0/You need version 1.89 MB3D because this program loads image-stacks
1/unzip to a windows PC.
2/find the archon straight folder and copy it's address i.e C:/windows/icehammer/documents/mesher/archonstraight
3/run run the mesher.exe program
4/use the button called: paste and copy millions of voxels to the graphics card
5/press space bar, wait a few seconds, a lofi preview will appear, you can rotate and zoom with WADS and QE keys
6/(optional step) press MANIFOLD button. It will correct all the manifold edges from the voxel map for 3d printing
7/perss AntiAlias, A deceptive button which should be labeled "save optimized mesh to HDD"
8/check the SAVED_FILES folder for the latest mesh labeled OPTIM, it shoul dbe 6mb, whereas the detail level of the file is worthy of at least 200mb, so it would be easy to print if the mesh was totally bona fide..
The mesh optimization is home baked and it's correct in the programs but they get a big confused because verices can happen in the middle of a polyugon edge, which apparently is my home baked short sightedness, because vertices of neighbor triangles are not normally found on a polygon edge. Perhaps with a fix hole flat step in meshmixer it will print.
The other options do actually work, but they are difficult to explain. Basically, the hollow/floodfill/reverse options can find the outside perimiter of cheese-hole fractals. you can then reverse the thing and do a hollow command, with a width specified in one of the illogically placed small text fields i.e. width of 25 gives you a hollowed fractal with a width 25, and the reverse the colors again, every time you can press space to update and see what you are doing, the flood fill starts from the axis cross hairs and processes 2 million voxels a second. the final step is to export an optim mesh.STL using ANTIALIAS button, or export a point.cloud version of the processed voxel using "billions of scans"button which will save a PLY file with MK5 filename label, which can be meshed using poisson in meshlab options. here are some screenshots:
the program is here:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1aoPg185MAUz2p54dh6CJs9tA705sE7wwThe slider on the right can select an animal mesh to boolean add to a fractal. to do that, reboot the app, paste the image stack address, select an animal, and press mesh render, and wait until it prints "VOXELIZED" you can then press space and preview the result and you can save a PLY and a STL version.
a 15 MB optimized mesh: