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i have being toying with fractals even before i made my first demoscener
prod, which not surprisingly was a 64 kb intro called "fractal chaos".
as you probably know, dear fractal freak, there is nothing special about
rendering 3d julia sets for quadratic polynmials, and so the internet is
crowded with such images (quaternionic mostly), mines included
but doing it on real time is another story. but only until you understand
what the Hubbard-Douady potential is and the doors of the famous distance
estimator formula open [hello UltraFractal users]. that tool in hand, one
can speed up the rendering [raymarching] up to 8 fps by using sse, in one
core cpu. since gpus are powerfull parallel machines, trying it there was
the obvious step. so obvious that actually Keenan Crane tryed it three
months before me :(
both implementations are similar of course. mine is slightly faster and
features analytic normals based on the gradient of the H-D potential, but
it's a bit less accurate for high iteration counts.
.shading :: ssao.
the intro also features some kind of realtime ambient occlusion, based on
ideas published by crytek that works quite fast actually [the bottleneck
is the raymarching].
.hd :: requirements.
you need a pretty powerful gfx card for this one, it's all about shading
and bandwidth. so you better try on an ati 2900 or nvidia 8800... i suck
and i don't care. it is also watchable on x1950 cards at 640x480. forget
about nv7800 and lower spec machines. on non ps3.0 gfx cards, it goes to
software rendering [that's how i programmed it!]. this intro is meant to
be watched in two years. i wasted half kilobytes on a dialog [instead of
the music], so all fractal freaks can watch the thing at good framerate
both today and tomorrow.