I’m finding that Mandelbulber is really addictive. First off, two Mandelbulb explorations:
I wised up and started doing a 1px field blur in Photoshop on the rendered images, which helps a lot in getting rid of sharp artifacts. On the first image I also painted in some dots and ran lens blur.
Next, a Mandelbox (Tglad’s variant):
I cheated a bit and used the liquify and oil paint filters in Photoshop to get a more surreal, painted look (hopefully giving it a little more humanity, making it less sterile).
Finally, a Menger sponge:
Going for a folk art look here. I will try very hard not to overuse the oil paint filter. I really will. I promise.
Some more Mandelbulbery, this time exploring the Mandelbox fractal instead of the Mandelbulb:
My process for these is to choose a fractal type in Mandelbulber, play around with the fractal parameters till I find an interesting shape, move the camera around until I get a good view, and render it. I then tweak the shader values (colors, specular, ambient occlusion, etc.) and the lights (position, color, etc.) and re-render till I get what I like. Finally I turn on depth of field and add a little fog.
Once I’m happy with the image in Mandelbulber, I export to PNG and open it in Photoshop to add some texturing. I also scale the image down a bit to get rid of some of the rendering artifacts. (It’s not wholly successful, but it does make a big difference.)
And here we are going for an underwater type of atmosphere (via aqua-colored fog and some vignetting in Photoshop):
