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Vol3D
An interactive 3D volume renderer

Currently designed to render 3D plasma ('diamond'-square) fractals of varying colors and 3D cross-sections of 4D quaternion Julia sets. I forget what constant parameter I chose for the Julia set. I'm sure you can change it somehow. The rendering is all done via slices of textures. I did this on non-3D-texture hardware, mind you. Lighting can also be applied across the volume. The normal is computed from the field divergence. Works very well.

I was intending to design a 3D water ripple program, but considering how long it takes to update the texture set, I decided it wasn't in my best of interest.

Light has always fascinated me. In an attempt to come up with true volumetric light simulation I developed this program. Somewhere along the line I reinvented some tomography equations, with some extra tweaks for colors and what not. I still haven't dug into scattering as much as I would like to.

Seeing shafts of light through clouds makes me stop and thank God.

I spend years messing around with the Mandelbrot/Julia sets. I was a big Chaos theory fan. When I first got into it, after I learned that Mandelbrot and Julia sets could be combined into 2x higher dimensional space, I always wondered what such a thing would look like. When I got this program working it really blew me away. The set felt a lot more realistic when I could actually see it as a 3D object sitting in front of me.

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Quaternion julia set

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Demonstration of slices

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Lighting example

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Additive blending

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Transparency blending

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Zoomed in to the spiral

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Different densities displayed

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Plasma fractal example

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Again, with additive blending