Mandelbulber is an experimental application that helps to make rendering 3D Mandelbrot fractals much more accessible. A few of the supported 3D fractals: Mandelbulb, Mandelbox, BulbBox, JuliaBulb, Menger Sponge, Quaternion, Trigonometric, Hypercomplex, and Iterated Function Systems (IFS). All of these can be combined into infinite variations with the ability to hybridize different formulas together.

• Completely free, open source, GNU GPL license
• 32-bit and 64-bit for Windows, Linux, and Mac (Intel & PPC)
• GUI created in the GTK+ environment
• Multi-core rendering

• 3D Navigator with tools to see how close the camera is to the fractal surface.
• Complex 3D shading: hard shadows, 3 modes of ambient occlusion, depth of field, reflections, fog, glow, primitive objects, and water.
• Lights can be manually or randomly placed. Volumetric lighting available.
• Camera animation: Keyframe and mouse controlled flight.
• Keyframe animation of all parameters.
• Camera lenses: three-point projection, fisheye, and equirectangular projection.
• Distance estimation algorithm to reduce render times and artifacts of ray marching.
• Low memory mode to render images larger than 16,000 x 16,000 pixels.
• OpenCL support in progress

• Mandelbulber utilizes ray marching to render 3D fractals. But what exactly is ray marching?
• Instead of ray tracing the whole distance between the camera and the nearest surface, the ray "marches" the distance in small steps. At each step a scattering is simulated. The final result is a synthesis of the various scatterings along the length of the ray.

Copyright 2011 Mandelbulber. All rights reserved.