http://www.skytopia.com/project/fractal/mandelbulb.html implications of this further down the road for us = ?
Most of the beauty in the mandelbrot set is mapping color to the non-member space - trying to draw that in 3-d would be tricky, though.
I don't see the point of these fractals other than... crappy screensavers. Or maybe some weird FPS games. Apart from that... oh, pretty... but that's about it
Have a look on dA then, some of the fractal art there will blow your mind (or at least change it ). There's been a 3d hack for apophysis for ages afaik, dont see whats so special about this unless the apophysis hack wasnt true 3d rendering.
I don't know, a "flying through" screensaver might be pretty awesome, at the cost of raping your CPU / GPU.
Its an impossibility unless they're pre-rendered, and that takes all the fun out of it, like all 3d rendering of any quality it cant be done in real time.
An elegant weapon for a more civilised age...where render farms are freely available to all and the rivers run dark with chocolate Maybe a use for OnLive tho, have a central cluster rendering ray-traced fractals in realtime and streaming HD footage for your screensaver?
I never got why rendering is so much harder on hardware than normal video game rendering, what's the fundamental difference? Aren't they both just drawing polygons and surfaces in a 3D space? Why is Crysis a million times easier to run than something with no textures but very crisp edges?
Well first off Crysis and such use the GPU for that purpose while rendering a fractal does not (lack of GPGPU fractal software thusfar I think, could be wrong), and secondly the equations for fractals typically suck, on an extraordinary level, but that is of course dependant on how many iterations you're doing, which also typically determines how far you'll be able to 'zoom' in since fractal outputs are typically considered 1.5d instead of 2d. Don't quote me on that though since the last time I dealt with fractal math on any kind of level I was still a kid and my father was doing some rendering on an old ass 286.
With games, textures, models etc are pre-loaded and use optimised code. Fractal rendering is rendering from the bottom up, you give it some units and basic pathways to follow (like julia etc) and it then works out firstly what it is, then what it looks like. With games, GPUs just have to work out what it looks like. Then there are tricks and tweaks that can be used to speed up rendering, but at the end of the day if you are doing 3d rendering you're also working out the fall of light on an object - and with fractals there are millions of planes for secondary reflection as well as the sheer intricacy of the fractal itself.
