Mandelbulb created entirely in Blender using Geometry Nodes. by fireangel
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Description
Yes, really. Blender 3.3 is newly released and shortly after downloading it I saw some YouTube tutorials on making 3D Fractals using some of the new features. An hour later, this came out of my copy of Blender.
Blender used 52Gb of RAM doing the calculations for this, so my 64Gb of RAM will need to be further expanded before I can make any of higher resolution. There are techniques that would allow me to produce some zoomed in parts of a Mandelbulb, so I will look into that for now. Eventually though I think bumping up the RAM to 128Gb is on the cards anyway, for other projects, so I may get into animated 3D fractals just for the fun of it. There are a lot of different ways to animate these so I am definitely going to experiment.
Comments (4)
Staticon
A Fantastic creation - it looks a little like some antique fine porcelain.
Great work. :-)
fireangel
Thank you! I think the look was because I made the gold leaf material for some parts of the mesh and used that distinctive blue colour pallet for the rest of it. Gold leaf on a shiny smooth blue sounds just like some of those porcelain vases in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
RodS
OK, this is fantastic! I've played around a bit with that Mandelbulb app, and had some pretty neat MBs come out of it. I think I still have it somewhere. And now Blender does it.
If things here ever calm down a bit, I really want to start messing with Blender.
Anyway, this is really great, and it does remind me a lot of fine porcelain.
fireangel
Thanks! Yep, still having fun when I get time to play.
Mandelbulb 3D and Mandelbulber make it possible to produce much finer detail in the mesh because they are optimised for surface following when performing the calculations, and Blender can't do that (yet!). This means they only have to perform a fraction of the calculations as they only do it in the vicinity of the surface. Blender has to calculate for very voxel (3D equivalent of a pixel) in the cube containing the final mesh. In this image it had to calculate for over a billion voxels, each time iterating the Mandelbulb equation four times through! After that it had to interpolate a surface from over a billion voxels. Still the whole thing took about nine minutes including rendering, which isn't bad.
However the material and lighting options in Blender are so far ahead it is definitely worth exploring some fractals in Blender rather than the specialist programs. I have now worked out how to animate this, but it will be a while before I show any animated Mandelbulb as I calculated that my machine will take about 92 hours to render 14 seconds of animation. I'm still going to do it, leaving it rendering overnight whenever I remember to do so.
ladylake
This is beautiful. I know nothing about Blender but played with Mandelbulb some some time ago.
fireangel
Mandelbulbs are fascinating, like many fractals! Thanks for taking a look.