Mandelbulber is open source software that creatively generates three-dimensional fractals.
The three dimensional fractal type, the “Mandelbulb” is calculated from a fairly similar pattern to the Mandelbrot set. The difference is that the vector z contains three components (x, y, z) or four dimensions (x, y, z, w ). As they are part of the z vector, they are denoted as (z.x, z.y, z.z). Examples being Hypercomplex numbers and quaternions.
Explore trigonometric, hyper-complex, Mandelbox, IFS, and many other 3D fractals.
Render with a great palette of customizable materials to create stunning images and videos.
Unlike most open source projects, the documentation (Mandelbulber End User Manual) is very good.
Key Features
- Rich GUI in Qt 5 environment.
- Renders trigonometric, hyper-complex, Mandelbox, IFS, and many other 3D fractals.
- Complex 3D ray-marching: hard shadows, ambient occlusion, depth of field, translucency & refraction, etc.
- Unlimited image resolution on 64-bit systems.
- Simple 3D navigator.
- Distributed Network Rendering. NetRender is a tool that allows you to render the same image or animation on multiple computers
simultaneously. If you have multiple computers connected to an Ethernet network, you can significantly increase overall computing power. - Rendering using OpenCL – enables offloading the rendering of the fractal to the GPU or to an accelerator card. This can highly reduce the render time.
- Key-frame animation for all parameters with different interpolations. Flight animation in Mandelbulber is like a camera motion track recorded in some kind of flight simulator.
- Material management.
- Texture mapping (color, luminosity, diffusion, normal maps, displacement).
- Exporting of 3D objects.
- Rendering queue.
- Command line interface for headless systems.
- Hotkeys support.
- Cross-platform support – the software is compiled for x86 and x64 CPUs (Linux, Windows, and OSX).
Website: github.com/buddhi1980/mandelbulber2
Support: Handbook
Developer: Krzysztof Marczak, Sebastian Jennen, Graeme McLaren, Bernando Martelli, Robert Pancoast
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
Mandelbulber is written in C++ and C. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Fractal Tools | |
|---|---|
| Mandelbulber v2 | Creatively generate three-dimensional fractals |
| JWildfire | Very powerful and flexible flame fractal generator |
| Gnofract 4D | Four-dimensional, inter-relational Mandelbrot and Julia set generator |
| XaoS | Real-time interactive fractal zoomer |
| Xfractint | Mature fractal generator |
| FractalNow | Offers quick generation of various types of fractals |
| NextFractal | Create amazing fractal images and other algorithmically generated images |
| Rsfrac | Terminal-based fractal explorer written in Rust |
| Fraqtive | Draws Mandelbrot and Julia fractals |
| Electric Sheep | Screensaver showing collective dream of sleeping computers |
| Qosmic | Cosmic recursive flame fractal editor |
| Fractals Explorer | Render and explore fractals in real time |
| Terraform | Fully-featured terrain generator using fractal formulae |
| Fractorium | Qt-based fractal flame edito |
| Fractalshades | Create static and interactive fractal visualizations |
| fractal-generator | Mandelbrot and Julia fractal generator |
| flam3 | Cosmic recursive fractal flames |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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