[vtk-developers] Mandelbulb challenge

[Will Schroeder]

Yesterday Jason Shepherd at Sandia posted a link to stunning visualizations
of an attempt to visualize the 3D Mandelbrot set
http://www.skytopia.com/project/fractal/mandelbulb.html#renders

Does anybody in the community want to take a stab at adding this capability
to VTK? Somewhere out there are hidden geniuses just waiting for a challenge
like this, I can feel it :-)

My initial, uninformed thoughts on this would be to approach it one of two
ways:
1. Create an implicit function and then use vtkSampleFunction to sample it.
This would provide very quick and dirty initial results and enable us to get
out heads around the mathematics.
2. Create a custom class to produce a 3D image dataset, and then render it
using one of the many rendering techniques in VTK. This would provide
greater flexibility in generating and defining data, including producing
coloration, etc.

Of course if you're really good you'll do this using the GPU :-) Maybe
support streaming to a region, etc.

I'd love to have this because, well it's really cool :-), but also as a test
case/data source for large data, streaming, HPC, volume rendering and so on.
If there is interest we'll create some wiki pages and kick the project off.

Cheers,

-- 
William J. Schroeder, PhD
Kitware, Inc.
28 Corporate Drive
Clifton Park, NY 12065
will.schroeder at kitware.com
http://www.kitware.com
(518) 881-4902
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