I'm Sorry!!!
I'm sorry! I ran away! Things were getting really shitty and I knew they were only going to get worse. Well, I'm walking again so things are much better now, right? Walking! Awesome! You see, I've got osteonecrosis in my hip joints. Or should I say, I used to have until I got hip joint replacements. Did I say ran? Crawled really. Dogs thought it was great, that I'd finally gained my senses, joined the real world. Poor kids, they'll never grasp (ha!) how nice it is to carry stuff. Anyways, back, very sorry, I'M SORRY! (I'm not sorry!) Missed you all a lot. Been very productive on Facebook though. One thing about Facebook, the triumph of data over information... like it or not it is the world now, or representative of a huge fraction of it. Think about it, almost two billion users. That's more users than Asians, Africans, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, etc etc. It is what it is, deal. Or better yet, just use the damn thing! Just don't let it use you. Yeah, I gotta cut down, which is why I'm back here. I'd rather spend my time writing something meaningful (information) than hyper-scrolling through screen after screen of data looking for a nugget of... information. Oh, had to change my name. It tagged "Atomic" as not being a valid first name (as if!), so Adam was as close as I could get late at night pissed off on short notice and whatever. It's now somewhat set in stone as you'll see in a bit. Or is it? Anyone know how to fake out FaceShit's name crap thing whatever you bastard?
Data! The Facebook group Mandelbulb Maniacs had about 3,000 members when I posted the first 20 seconds of an animation as a "Holy shit the artwork here is awesome and I'm really looking forwards to learning from you all." introduction to the group. This was around last year, the first week of January and I was heading into the city for a long stay to start getting my hips sorted out. By the time I'd really settled in, put my "Bad Girl" back together and logged on, it had a ton of shares and a ton of views. Great, but I was embarrassed because it was an intro work clip and I hadn't had the time to dig up the link for the artist/picture/parameters that I'd used as a starting point! Non-attribution of credit? Nuuuu! But when you've got a directory with tons of pictures, parameters, multiple parameter thread branches often with series names/numbers key-mashed in in the excitement of flying through these incredible worlds.... things can get a bit confused.
So where was I... Did I get to the part where someone tossed it up on the homepage of this British PsyTrance producer? Yeah, that's when things got interesting. It got over a million views in I dunno, two weeks? Right now it's just over seven million. The membership of the Maniacs group went up 50% in a week and I'm proud to say that I got my brother joined up as number 9,002. Over 9,000! Missed it by 1, we tried. So welcome to the world of procedural graphics and fractal mathematics! You're about to witness as big a transformation in graphics as the introduction of 3D rendering... really. Dig... I've been pulling 3D objects out of the Mandelbulb3D software, which you can do in two ways. Voxel slices, and there's now a built-in 3D mesh generator. To get anything close to proper detail on an object you'll need a shit-load of polygons. Here's an object I'm working on rendered in Keyshot6. It took 4 minutes 15 seconds on 7 cores at 4.7 Ghz (Go AMD!). The mesh was 400x3 and originally 1.4 million polygons, one round of simplification to cut that in half and a couple of rounds of smoothing, that's what you get. Now that's just one object, can you imagine how many polygons you've got in a frame from a movie like Dr. Strange? Yeah. How would you like to reduce that to oh, what you could write on a napkin? Here's the same object rendered in Mandelbulb3D, same resolution, and it took only 30 seconds. To tell Mandelbulb3D just how to render this, the formulas plus all the lighting and shading parameters all you have to do is copy this to clipboard and paste from into the program. That's it. (Livejournal is going to reformat that text to hell but whatever, shoot me, you get the idea)
Mandelbulb3Dv18{
g....Uy....u1...o0....6...EVCnL1Q34yzajOIIAe/W3EREPNmtVMDzPovE3Ai9wozE4loupzgyxj
................................w2FtDpeaF.2........Y.ds/................Y.2...wD
...Uz6....k0..../M.01....2Ur1...M0...2EA.....Ug63SIu6znD/.kG0..EmI3o./.........U
zEEnAnYD12../2.rzzzzzzznz0................................U0.....y1...sD...../..
.z1...sDrjXyEjPN7xn2a//YrKlEzcC6fPJeT.kDPRERYfXBow9feDRBqczBzodo8txtZioDnjEzpg6C
.xXfFJeIFaaFzK1PidoT9xnDU.....29/.............wD.6....sD..G.....................
.............oAnAt1...sD....zw1...................................kG0..EQ....2..
.....CnAnz1.......kz.wzzzX.U..6......g2...EB....7/...I2...EF....5/...UY1...UJID0
So1U.ifiJyzY8doz....z1...o5..s..o75I...alwF.HWzD6odIWOorVyX.............WxjanV/.
.6gJ7KDgdz9.dhSA5XWrz0..........36FF/UoP80..GORVIaI8.TZm2z3Uh4vj.UZY.Fh3p.I.kc..
2OJ9............N/..........nmPes1...LG6LcDYgk0..oJAxJtFd.A.3rLXFgphz0krpHM9PI1E
3QU01cNNk/..884gaAo../ElW56Ctc1E.UFmk/6nB.2..6Qjp0Ewl5j75dWkxK9.LTxpocoB0rPh.Ied
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E6../EU.nAk.....I....A....kL/pKMuZaPb7oPsBpI371.......................k/9.......
...........fNaNaNaNqz4........xD........kz1.....................................
................................................................................
.....................A.....3....0....wJEh3aSdtqN0x4S.65.........................
.Q...................MnAnAnAnQzj/.......Ez1.....................................
................................................................................
................................/....M....k.....4x4PYZaPb/GGiF56ExqR............
..........U0.U............................2.......oX.b........zD................
................................................................................
..........................................E.....I....o....UMjVLG4B3.4B3.mN4.....
.........................sU1..../6U./2...../.........lzzzzzzzT.Evzzzzzzz5.2JaNaN
aNa5.7.........E...................................................wz...........
........kz1........wz...................................}
{Titel: ChalicePerspective}Now the formulas are a bit of a thing as it's all on the complex plane (at the least!) and often use a new mathematical operation called folding. You remember in school when they taught you multiplication, long division, roots, and folding? Me neither. Well, when you're working with a complex plane instead of a number line... well you get the idea. So this object is made by sort of layering three of these and dropping it into a type of iterated function. Wow, these formulas must be really nasty stuff eh! Yeah, really. Here's the entire algo for the object, the entire world and all variations used to make that viral video clip.
x = X_add - abs(x)
y = Y_add - abs(y)
z = Z_add - abs(z)
rr = x*x + y*y + z*z
if rr < sqr(Min_R) then m = Scale/sqr(Min_R) else
if rr < 1 then m = Scale/rr else m = Scale
x = x * m + Cx
y = y * m + Cy
z = z * m + Cz
This is the full clip I intended to share with the group.
I hope you like Throbbing Gristle.
Click to viewJust like the Mandel, do a simple operation (subtraction of the absolute value of previous value), and in this case scaling to clamp for limits, repeat. Then there's a simple kaleidoscope mirroring but doesn't that sound trivial by now? So, now do you think I was indulging in hyperbole earlier? "As profound as the introduction of 3D graphics itself." I'll stand by that statement.
So that was last year, what about this one? Well, it started out slow but then I got a message from said music producer.... "We're on a really tight deadline for this video and need some filler. Could we use that video clip from last year?" "Sure! Let me show you what this other program I've been working with can kick out, it's the bomb!" See Mandelbulb3D currently suffers from one major drawback.... it's CPU only. Fragmentarium however, is an open-source platform for GLSL shader language and was written specifically with rendering procedural geometry. Wanna see some core benchmarks, FX-8350 @ 4.8 Ghz vs R9-200 at stock? Guess who wins, c'mon, just guess! This thing will crank out a full five minutes of animation at 1080p in hours. That's (over!) 9,000 frames. So I got to work and was able to deliver such a video in the ridiculously short time-frame available. Boo-Yah! A few months later I noticed that a bunch of videos had been uploaded to his page. Ran through them and there I was, look for it at about the two-minute mark. Nice crystal caverns eh? I'll leave you all with a nice calm (high-def 4K!) fly-through of those crystal caverns. Should finish this one up sometime.
*Thank you Livejournal for your "save from draft computer crash and piss-fest"! For that alone, going to paid account.