Mandelbulb render with shapes other than spheres?

[Anonymous]

Hi there,

I've been experimenting with the old Mandelbulb as shown in this tutorial. https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/A5AFMUG/How+to+Render+a+Mandelbulb

All good so far but I was wondering is it possible to change the rendered spheres to cubes or other user defined objects?

I imagine this needs to be done in the procedural itself. I have been looking at this https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/A5ARP/Large+Datasets+from+Procedurals

but my "mandelbulb_proc.dll" looks nothing like the "mandelbulb.cpp" there.

Using Maya 2018.6 on Win7.

Many thanks,

Chog.

[Anonymous]

Monday bump .... glad to see others are interested in this. Any ideas from anyone on how to start tackling it?

Cheers!

[madsd]

Have you evaluated persuing a different route than compiling c++ nodes?
With OSL we have a ton of fractals we can compile ( I did several ) and Arnold can render implicit surfaces, if you combine these 2 things, you can render SDF ( Signed Distance Fields ) and get perfect uniform surfaces without using particle spheres.

Im not a Maya guy, but soon I can point you to pseudo code to get Arnold implicit surfaces rendering ( its working in 3ds max via scripting and some general calls and defines )

If you prefer to work with dll files, OK, I havent checked out the setup through that route, but there should be possible to define the bounding volume for the procedural in the code.

[Stephen.Blair]

mandelbulb creates an Arnold points node, and the points are rendered as spheres. You could use an operator to change points.mode to 'quad' or 'disc'

But for anything else, you'll have to write some new code and replace the build_nodes() function

[Anonymous]

Wow, thank you both that's great!

@Mads Drøschler ... tbh compiling C++ nodes is not something I know how to do! I'm happy to have made it this far. Implicit Surfaces sound intriguing though, please point me in the right direction 🙂

@Stephen Blair ... aha! Excellent, will give that a try.

To increase the 'fractalness' I had the idea of making each point another instance of the overall geometry/spheres but unfeasible I think unless you kept it very minimal.

[Anonymous]

@Stephen Blair ... 'ello again. So, just got back on to this ... Been looking at the tutorials on operators but am getting nowhere fast!

Would you mind walking me through how to use the operator to change points.mode to 'quad'?

Thank you in advance!