Last week I discovered this website: http://www.skytopia.com/project/fractal/mandelbulb.html. It describes a new way of rendering 3D Mandelbrot fractals using three components simplex numbers, instead of the traditional 4D Quaternion. This new function produces a lot more interesting 3D fractal details and lead to very impresive renderings.
I have implemented this function as a GPU producer into GigaVoxels and I am able to render it in real-time as you can see on this video. It is a work-in-progress, but it already works quite well ! (around 20FPS)
The fractal is computed on the GPU, not during the ray-casting as usually done, but as voxels stored into an Octree.
Voxels are produced on-the-fly and stored into a cache in video memory in order to be reused while they stay visible. The octree is also subdivided on-the-fly and the subdivision is triggered directly by the ray-casting kernel. That prevents to generate any occluded data.
I compute Ambient Occlusion very efficiently using filtered low resolution voxels and soft shadows are computed with secondary rays.
Written by Visiteur on 2009-11-30 14:20:34Impressionnant !
David.R
Looks great Written by Guest on 2009-12-03 07:24:53Do you plan to release a demo ?
Also interesting would be to use Gigavoxels to visualize a procedural landscape on the fly, created from perlin noise, height-slang with a volumetric extension or somethin similar.
Sven
Written by Guest on 2009-12-03 15:06:57incredible
Written by Guest on 2009-12-04 05:32:15Please release a demo!
Would love to have a go flying round this beautiful bit of math that strangely reminds me alot of art i've seen in temples in Nepal!
BTW, support for 3Dconnexions SpaceNavigator in the demo would be brilliant! If you have'nt had a play with one yet, you should they are great (&cheap!)
Written by Guest on 2009-12-04 11:13:10Fantastic work, Cyril! Voxel raycasting rules!
Written by Guest on 2009-12-04 11:16:57Hi Cyril, do you use SSAO or raytraced AO?
Written by Guest on 2009-12-04 13:38:07Your latest presentation (Gigavoxels come into play) mentions:
Animation
- Yes this can be efficiently animated - Volume deformation (skinning)
Please tell me more!
fov Written by Guest on 2009-12-04 15:27:23If you reduce field of view when 'close', I suspect it can get a lot more interesting. In the current videos, there is only translation and rotation of the camera.. which is anawagous [sic - elmer fudd mode to avoid stupid censor filter] to panning and rotating in 2D without reducing field of view there [again, avoiding a ridiculous filter here by using different words].
Written by Guest on 2009-12-04 15:42:39hehe, you said anaw
Written by Guest on 2009-12-04 17:36:43Very nice stuff. Beats the crap out of current mesh-based technology in terms of quality. The future looks voxelly.
Mind-boggling Written by Guest on 2009-12-04 20:40:04You, Sire are a genius
FPS IS RELATIVE ;) Written by Visiteur on 2009-12-05 00:46:37C'est complètement fou. On what kind of graphics card are you getting the 20fps?
FPS IS RELATIVE II ;) Written by Visiteur on 2009-12-05 00:49:12And what resolution?
Sweet! Written by Guest on 2009-12-07 21:44:19Looks great! Really gives you a feel for the shape. Wish you would do more z ooming. (third time ive typed this message because of filtering)
