Visualising Volumetric Fractals

Fractal images have for many years been a richsource of exploration by those in computer science who also havean interest in graphics. They often served as a way of testing theperformance of new computing hardware and to explore thecapabilities of emerging display technologies. While there havebeen forays by some into 3D geometric fractals, the 3Dequivalents of the Mandelbrot set have been largely ignored. Thisis largely due to the lack of suitable tools for rendering these setsexcept perhaps as isosurfaces, a rather unsatisfactory and limitedrepresentation. The following will illustrate the application ofGPU based raycasting, a now relatively standard approach tovolume rendering, to the representation of volumetric fractals.Leveraging existing software that has been designed for generalvolume visualisation allows the interested 3D fractal explorer tofocus on the mathematical generation of the volume data ratherthan reinventing the entire volume rendering pipeline