(Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3x4uJJqs_w)

The music in the video is ‘Life is strange (trance remix)’ by darkangell.

I recorded the scenes using my work in progress Mandelbulb Viewer/Fly through builder application (which is on my github, if you’re curious). While working on this video, I added a few new effects like glow and fog, and also a periodic ‘beat’ to synchronize some effects to music.

As I mentioned before, the viewer is based on a fragment shader implementation of the Mandelbulb fractal by Tom Beddard. His blog has a lot of nice renderings also.

Ray-tracing is a tedious process, who knew? Normally capturing video in real or close to real time is something that I just take for granted. For this video, capturing a 20 second fly over (about enough for one shot in the final video) took around 30 minutes to render.

The rendering lag became slightly more manageable after implemented recording/config file support in the viewer, so I could go back and tweak the settings of a previous recordings that didn’t quite make the cut, and try again. I also got into the habit of testing the recording at low quality at 640×360 (1/4 720p, same aspect ratio), to get a feel for how it would look in motion at the right frame rate.

Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/10740680

Update: I wasn’t very happy with the contrast levels of the original video, so I decided to re-upload it and ended up re-editing it. Feels a lot more coherent now.

Update II: ‘Life is Strange’ received second place is the Fractalforums.com Spring 2010 Competition. You can see the full set of video entries here.

Here are a few non-typical renderings of the Mandelbulb taken very close to the surface that I thought were interesting (click for full size):

I’ve been working on a viewer/explorer program based on Tom Beddard’s implementation of the algorithm. The viewer will let you fly around using the mouse and keyboard, set up flight paths and make recordings (using the same exporter functions as Gource). It’s not quite there yet, but hopefully after Linux Conf I’ll have some time to finish it off and make some videos.

I already have designs on what music I want to use. I’m thinking some Jarre.

My previous visualization, Logstalgia, was for website access logs. It turns out the information in a website access log and a VCS history are actually some what similar:

• they both track users, sort of (an ip address may or may not identify one user, but often enough they do)
• they show the users interaction with a hierarchical directory/file path. Sometimes on a website the path may be a directory path with no specific file, but we can treat such cases as the user requesting the ‘index’ file at that path.
• they store the time the interaction occurred.

So the up shot is you can visualize website access logs with Gource, and it looks a little something like this:

This feature is built into the current release of Gource, so if your website uses the Apache combined access log format, give it a go.

I like how interesting patterns in the clouds emerge out of random behavior. To me, that’s the ideal outcome of a procedural animation.

I think I might use this to generate background pictures.