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This is fantastic brad! Have you experimented with the order of calculation? Does doing the powers and summing then doing the division before each iteration produce different results to doing after each iteration?

What iteration level is this? And what view are you presenting?

Changing c might affect whether this is a julia or a mandelbrot.

Have you tried ?

I haven't experimented with different orders of operations.

I plotted the surface based on distance estimate and pixel size and distance to camera, rather than on iteration level. Although I did use a maximum iteration cutoff of 64, most points wouldn't have ever gotten that high. The view is looking in the positive y direction, with the z-axis pointing up.

I didn't try z^4/z^2 + c, but I did try one other rational function, this time of degree 8/2. These rational functions render so slooow I think I'm going to look into something else for a while...

Is the centre of the view the xy plane, and so is the symmetry a type of reflection in xy? Looks very interesting and vortex like and like a nebula surrounding a black hole in a cosmic ray wind!1

looks cool

The coloring just comes from different colored lights at different locations. I don't have shadows implemented yet, but I am using the origin point orbit trap idea for fake ambient occlusion.

...but I'm also currently making a simplification in my lighting calculations that might not be valid here. The surface I'm rendering is based on a distance estimate, but the surface normals I'm using are based on a numerical gradient of the smoothed iteration count, because that's easier than actually computing the gradient of the distance estimate. (I use the iteration gradient to compute my DE.) So the surface normals I'm using in my lighting calculations aren't really guaranteed to be truly normal to the surface I'm plotting. I was hoping it would be a close enough approximation, but this lighting looks somehow too unrealistic to me so I suspect that in an unusual fractal like this it's not really that close.