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this question i should probably formulating direct to Jess, but probably many of you that work with 3D softwares such as  3D Max, Maya etc  would love to have such a powerful plugin as Mandelbulb right in the Max, i mean , i got no idea how difficult is to do this , but image its real potential when this will happen, i mean personally i would love to have Mb3D as plugin in 3D Max so much more easy and more speeding process do to  Mac or Maya core integration ..

cheers

... not really ... especially a render program could deal perfectly with a pure implicit surface definition, and some renderers somehow provide this, in fact it is just a matter of fact until the "big" renderers incorporate such objects in their rendering engine ... it will happen, its just a matter of time, in fact, from a theoretical point of view it is the base-work and theoretical foundation that is layed out by such programs ( like mb3d and mandelbulber ) and the techniques are generally very well known, its just that the "professional" rendering programs set upon the horse of describing a scene using triangles, and spheres for example are in many rendering programs already "true spheres", but the technique of assembling such surfaces and fine grading them is not yet common for the programs


in fact, it is really really just a matter of time until the programs jump on the horses we lay out for them, and the possibilities are ... a little more than infinite ... hahaha ... said that, just thinking about applying the nice user interface tools like mesh-deforming to an existing implicit surface ( like a fractal one ... ) and use a mandelbox just as a tiny building block for scenes of such programs ...

another aspect is when will it be truly available in realtime gaming engines, at the virge of cyberspace regarding the occulus rift, this is a must have for true and more than nice scenes the discussion is a long ongoing talk about when implicit surfaces will come into 3d, but it is neglected nowadays - because of rendering power, for sure - but cyberspace needs arbitrary detailed objects to feel real for us humans, computing power and theoretical scene management for such set ups are just not experienced enough, but just stay calm and watch, it is a straightforward process coming next !!!

There is actually this that was done a few years ago now:
http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/duncan/mandel_maya_madness

I think support for this has only just landed in the latest versions of Maya though.

A few days ago Arnold published these Mandelbulb demos:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/z4wy_oc6Y3A&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/v/z4wy_oc6Y3A&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1</a>
https://support.solidangle.com/display/mayatut/How+to+Render+a+Mandelbulb+with+MtoA

Also, POV-ray has nice support for rendering implicit surfaces. Some time ago I rendered this using global illumination:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/syntopia/12570917473/

I have also played around with meshing distance fields recently (for 3D printing) and I don't think that is the way to go for integration with 3D software - you need an unholy amount of polygons for any decent resolution.