Fractal (2013)

Fractal is my project for the Master’s Degree in MAT.

The project is a real-time interactive immersive ray casting renderer that will simulate various hypercomplex fractals. The focus of the project was to provide an easy-to-use non-scanline interactive environment to novice programmers, in particular, artists who want to experiment with various fractal structures.

My research in 3D fractals had led me to the hypercomplex fractals such as the Mandelbulb. After visualizing the fractal structure, I soon realized that this could provide a spectacular immersive experience if this could be rendered real-time. Although there were many ways to visualize the 3D structure of the Mandelbulb, the most efficient way was to use distance-based ray casting. However, this was not an easy task at the time, and I had to heavily modify AlloSystem, which was the multimedia software framework I was using in MAT. Now this project allows people to easily inject GLSL code into the renderer that automatically takes care of interactivity, stereo projection and 3D warping as needed.