Inspired by the recent post on Skytopia, Tom Beddard created a 3D Mandelbulb Ray Tracer as a Quarz Composer and Pixel Bender plugin that will allow you to generate very similar 3D Mandelbrot fractals. Unlike many other 3D fractals the Mandelbulb continues to reveal finer details the closer you look. This implementation was written as a Pixel Bender filter then ported over to QuartzComposer as a GLSL patch to enable animation. The scripts run on the GPU which makes real-time interactive exploration possible.

There are quite a few controls including: power: the power n used in the fractal equation, maxIterations: higher values will reveal more detail when close to the fractal surface but increases calculation time, bailout: the ‘escape’ threshold for the fractal iteration, bounding: the radius of a bounding sphere around the fractal that is used to speed up the ray tracing, epsilon scale: increases the number of steps in the ray tracing process and will help bring out fine details, phase: change the θ and φ phases, and many more..

See images gallery and on Flickr.

For Pixel Bender open the Mandelbulb.pbk file with the Adobe Pixel Bender Toolkit or copy it into the Pixel Bender Files folder in your Photoshop CS4 installation directory (you will need to have installed the PB plugin for Photoshop first).

3D Mandelbulb Ray Tracer

See also Fractal Explorer Plugin for PS and AE [Mac, Windows]

A quaternion Julia set is a four-dimensional equivalent of the standard two-dimensional fractal. By taking a 3D ‘slice’ through the 4D space it is possible to visualise a solid fractal.

This quaternion Julia set ray tracer is a port of Keenan Crane’s Cg GPU implementation for Adobe Pixel Bender and a more general GLSL shader patch for Quartz Composer. The Pixel Bender version lets you render out high resolution images in Photoshop CS4 (or animate the parameters in After Effects). The Quartz Composer patch lets you animate any parameter in real-time.

Very impressive.

Read more about the making at 4D Quaternion Julia Set Ray Tracer

See also Fractal Explorer Plugin for PS and AE [Mac, Windows]

“Morph” by Skylined is an ASCII-animation in the browser, using JavaScript. The animations are made up of two parts. The first one is a “Morph” effect between four different ASCII logos and the second part being Mandelbrot fractal look-alike zoom and rotation.

Created by Skylined

ASCII Animation (ASCIImation) “Morph” by Skylined (using JavaScript).

(via DigitalTools)

The Fractal Explorer plugin is a couple of Pixel Bender filters that will generate Mandelbrot and Julia set fractals to any power in real-time.

Besides producing still images in Photoshop, things can really become interesting when the plugin is used in AfterEffects as every parameter can be animated (see movies below).

To use you need Pixel Bender Toolkit available from Adobe’s website. The Fractal Explorer plugin is free and you can download it here.

Fractal Explorer Pixel Bender Plugin