MX 17 Repository: The Mandelbulber2 Thread

[Stevo]

We now have the latest version, 2.16, in our main repository.

Mandelbulber creatively generates three-dimensional fractals.

Explore trigonometric, hyper-complex, Mandelbox, IFS, and many other 3D fractals.

Render with a great palette of customizable materials to create stunning images and videos.

The possibilities are literally infinite!

Features

Enlightening Documentation
Renders trigonometric, hyper-complex, Mandelbox, IFS, and many other 3D fractals
Complex 3D ray-marching: hard shadows, ambient occlusion, depth of field, translucency & refraction, etc.
Rich GUI in Qt 5 environment
Unlimited image resolution on 64-bit systems
Program compiled for x86 and x64 CPUs (Linux, Windows, OSX)
Simple 3D navigator
Distributed Network Rendering
Rendering using OpenCL
Key-frame animation for all parameters with different interpolations
Material management
Texture mapping (color, luminosity, diffusion, normal maps, displacement)
Exporting of 3D objects
Rendering queue
Command line interface for headless systems

Users with Nvidia cards can install "nvidia-opencl-icd", enable openCL in the Preferences, and enjoy accelerated rendering using their GPUs in fast, medium, and full modes. I can confirm this works a treat with Nvidia cards using Optimus and Bumblebee, also. There are openCL drivers in the repo for Intel GPUs also, but they don't seem to work with my hardware...perhaps a backport from upstream would fix that.

The program also ships with a large number of examples from simple to complex, so you don't have to create everything from scratch.

[Stevo]

Edit: My Coffee Lake Intel GPU also works now using openCL with a backport of beignet-opencl-icd 1.3.2, so I'm sending that to the repo. Older Intel GPUs probably work with the version in the stretch repo. It's still a lot slower than the Nvidia discrete GPU, of course.

AMD GPU users can try using the mesa-opencl-icd package in our repo--that was backported along with our newer Mesa.

[asqwerth]

What a cool program! I'd never heard of it before.

[Stevo]

Those screenshot renders are from configurations in the included examples, but I don't know which ones, exactly. Those take longer to render than the simple ones, though.

[Stevo]

Now updated to 2.17 in the main repo! Changes include:

Code: Select all

mandelbulber2 (2.17-0.1~mx17+1) mx; urgency=medium

  * New upstream release.
    - Added new fractal formulas
    - josKleinianV2
    - mandelbulbAtan2Power2
    - bristorbrot2
    - mandeltorus
    - mandelbulbEye
    - transfBoxWrap4d
    - transfSphericalInvV2 BETA
    - added sphere inversion to PseudoKleinian and Jos Kleinian
    - fixed scale in transfAbsAddConditional 3d & 4d
    - fixed type2 fold in amazingSurfMod2
    - OpenCL: Added support for multi-GPU rendering
    - OpenCL: Rendering by GPUs moved to separate thread. Image processing and
      refreshing doesn't slow down rendering and GPUs can be utilized to 100%
    - OpenCL: Added reservation of GPU time for the system
    - OpenCL: Improved quality of volumetric effects in OpenCL mode (when the 
      distance from camera varies greatly)
    - OpenCL: improved error handling
    - OpenCL: Thumbnails in PreviewFileDialog are now rendered using OpenCL (or
      using CPU if distance to fractal is less than 1e-5)
    - Fractals: Corrected rendering of fractal cross-sections
    - Fractals:
    - Fixed problem with Pseudo Kleinian fractal which doesn't use maxiter and
      interior mode
    - Shaders: Added new properties for material color:
    - luminosity color the same as object color
    - color of reflections
    - color of reflections the same as object color
    - color of transparency
    - color of transparency the same as object color
    - Shaders: Added roughness property to materials
    - Shaders: Fixed variation in brightness between different image resolutions
      when "connect detail level with image resolution" was enabled.
    - Shaders: Fixed bug causing wrong appearance of specular highlights when
      diffusionTextureIntensity was low and texture mapping was disabled.
    - Shaders: Fixed bug: glow was not calculated on CPU with interior mode
    - Shaders: There was missing updating input.delta in volumetric shader (CPU
      code) - issue #614
    - Shaders: Fixed bug #618. Max distance for SSAO was limited to 100.0
    - Shaders: Fixed bug in AmbientOcclusion shader (wrong appearance when
      maxiter reached)
    - Shaders: Corrected code for non-DE shading mode to not use distance
      estimation at all.
    - UI: Added displaying of last rendered tiles with noise statistics when MC
      is used.
    - UI: Fixed not working Reset (local reset) buttons
    - UI: Local Load/Save buttons now do not load/save animation data (caused
      problems with loading partial settings)
    - UI: Corrected tooltips in Load/Save/Reset buttons
    - UI: Refreshing of thumbnails can not occupy more threads than total number
      of CPU cores
    - UI: Reduced minimum width of navigation dock
    - UI: Substituted load/save/reset buttons with smaller icon buttons
    - UI: Fixed bug #602 - mouse dragging sometimes continued when mouse buttons
      were released
    - Queue: Fixed problem with locking rendering engine by updating of Queue
      thumbnails
    - Files: Added option to save each image channel in a separate directory
    - CLI: Added --gpuall (-G) CLI option to use all available GPU devices

  * debian/copyright: update years.
  * debian/control: change recommends to beignet-opencl-icd | 
    - nvidia-opencl-icd | mesa-opencl-icd

[asqwerth]

I wish I knew how to use it. I installed the package you built a few months ago out of curiosity, opened it, and got lost. It's been just sitting there.....

[Stevo]

You can click on some of the examples shown up on the top, and then the "Render" button in the Navigation section in the upper right. You can then click on the render screen to keep moving in, or use some of the other mouse buttons to rotate the scene.

You can load one of the many other examples shipped in /usr/share/mandelbulber2/examples under File/Load Example, and add those to your favorites.

That's about how far I've got with it, too.

There is a nice user manual zipped up in

/usr/share/doc/mandelbulber2-data/Mandelbulber_Manual.pdf.gz

though.