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]

Created by Simon Strandgaard, Graphic Designer Toolbox is an alternative graphics editor. Instead of manipulating graphics directly as you do in Photoshop, in GDT you build blocks for bitmap and vector manipulation. Not too dissimilar from Quarz Composer, GDT allows you to create generative artworks using visual object based programming. It’s all created realtime, non destructive and easy to learn.

You start out with an empty grid, insert a Photo building block, combine with many other effector blocks and adjust the parameter. The great thing is that you can create assets. In other words, you have made this cool web button out of a few building blocks but at some point you need a variation of this button. All you have to do is to copy it and adjust a few parameters. Within seconds you have your new button.

Whilst i haven’t yet had a chance to play with the app properly, it does nevertheless sound like a great way to remove yourself from the traditions of thinking about image graphically and more about construction. If the process is as important for you as the final outcome, you should definitely give Graphic Designer Toolbox a go. A demo version is available and the full version will cost you $42.94 (€29.95).

Graphic Designer Toolbox

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