"Mandelbulb," a 3D Mandlebrot Construct, Discovered

symbolset writes "Many know the beauty and complexity of the Mandelbrot set. For some years now a few enterprising mathematicians / rendering fiends have been seeking a true 3D Mandelbrot set. A month ago a solution was found, and it is awesome to behold."

Comments

Actually, the Mandelbrot set is already 4D

[maxwell demon]

While the Mandelbrot set as usually defined is 2D, each point has an associated Julia set, where instead of the additive constant, the starting point is varied (the original Mandelbrot set always uses zero as starting point). Together, they give a 4-dimensional set, where two dimensions are given by the starting point (zr, zi), and the other two by the additive constant (cr, ci). The original Mandelbrot set is a cut through this 4D set at the plane zr=zi=0, while the Julia sets are cuts orthogonal to theat, at planes with constant cr and ci.

Slashdotted

[Kaladis Nefarian]

Seems to be slashdotted, cached version: http://www.skytopia.com.nyud.net:8090/project/fractal/mandelbulb.html

w00t

[lycium]

cool, nice to see my images linked on slashdot :) hopefully we'll have some gpu-accelerated results to show you all soon (and for those with opencl supporting cards, executables).

btw interested parties might like to check out my 3840x2400 resolution render of the 7th degree version here: http://lyc.deviantart.com/art/siebenfach-139038934 (it's buried deep in the thread, and fractalforums is creeking a bit)

Fraqtive

[nephridium]

A very nice open source app, available through the Ubuntu/Debian repositories. The author's page even got a windows version.

It supports multi-core CPUs, i.e. if you really want to tax each of your CPU's core to the limit, just use the app to browse through the mandelbrot set. It also supports a 3D extrapolation of the 2D set (OpenGL and software).

Strangely enough it doesn't seem all that popular, as the forum doesn't seem all that populated..