
True 3D Mandlebrot-type fractal (2007) - pirocks
http://www.fractalforums.com/3d-fractal-generation/true-3d-mandlebrot-type-fractal/
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mrob
This is the thread where early research into the Mandelbulb happened. It's
historically interesting, but as the final post says: "This topic has been
locked because the main thread theme has reached some kind of a result, and is
simply far to big now"

For those who are more interested in the Mandelbulb in general than the
history of its discovery, the Wikipedia page is a better starting point:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbulb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbulb)

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Grustaf
You can apply the Mandelbrot iteration (or any similar scheme) to quaternions
to get 4d fractals, and although they are 'true' 4d, it doesn't add anything
interesting. As I recall from doing this in high school 20+ years ago, you
just get the normal set swept around two of the axes, so no new information.

It could be different with other fractals, I guess it's time to try again now
that computers are fast and I can actually program!

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FreeFull
Quaternion julia sets look pretty neat.

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Sharlin
Especially when animated by varying over time the 3D hyperplane on which the
object is projected. POV-Ray, the venerable open-source raytracer, has had a
4D Julia primitive for ages and with current processors is a pretty good way
to explore the Julia space.

But the 4D versions don't exhibit the sort of dizzying complexity you can
endlessly zoom into like the original Mandelbrot/Julia set. This is mentioned
by the starter of the thread.

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andreareina
Oh wow, POV-Ray was finally open-sourced. I remember playing around with it
maybe 15 years ago now. The Internet Ray Tracing Competition[1] was still a
going concern, and one of the rules was that post-processing was disallowed.
So people got motion blur by recompiling the program to average several frames
together, which didn't count as post-processing since it was still a ray-
tracer that did it.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Ray_Tracing_Competiti...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Ray_Tracing_Competition)

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Sharlin
Wasn't the source "always" available but just under a custom non-FOSS
compatible license? I used to use POV-Ray quite a bit and participated in the
IRTC a few times as well. Even 15 years ago the reason for keeping the legacy
license was IIRC mostly that it would have been a huge task to get in touch
with all the contributors or alternatively to rewrite all the parts that could
not have been relicensed.

~~~
andreareina
Yeah the source was available for as long as I used it (hence people being
able to hack on it for the motion blur), but always under the no-
redistribution license. I wasn't yet very familiar with FOSS but I remember
understanding that the source being available was a big deal, and the no-
redistribution clause was also a big deal.

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erty78
There is a program to visualize 3D Mandelbrot:

[http://www.mandelbulber.com](http://www.mandelbulber.com)

