Small and simple project where I program a Mandelbulb-set renderer from scratch using both C++ and Python.
The cpp folder is the final product. The python folder was used for development, but does the same thing (just slower).
Compile the C++ code from within the cpp/srs folder (on windows):
g++ -Wall -Wextra -fopenmp .\srs\main.cpp -o program
and run it to generate data. You can then plot the generated data with a python plotting code 'plot_data' that I provide. This code relies on ffmpeg to create mp4 animations, which you can get from here: https://ffmpeg.org/download.html
This project combined some interesting topics:
- Ray marching: to find out what the camera sees.
- Signed Distance Functions: to find out how far a ray can safely march in a particular direction.
- Lots of Linear Algebra: for rotating the camera and light source.
You can read more on these topics here:
- http://blog.hvidtfeldts.net/index.php/2011/06/distance-estimated-3d-fractals-part-i/
- http://celarek.at/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/realTimeFractalsReport.pdf
- https://www.3dgep.com/understanding-the-view-matrix/
