VFX Fractal Toolkit

Set of tools for generating fractal and generative art.

About

This is my graduation project: VFX Fractal Toolkit (VFT), which I developed at Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg while studying Technical Directing.

It contains tools written in OpenCL, OSL, Blink, Python, VEX and JavaScript intended to be used in Houdini, Arnold, Nuke or a web browser.

The code is in prototyping stage and many features are experimental. It is not production ready and most parts of it need refactoring.

Here are some animations produced with it:

I had a chance to present progress of VFT at two FMX conferences (2018, 2019), you can find the recordings here:

It was also featured in Posters Preview: SIGGRAPH 2019 video:

This project was presented at The 15th ACM SIGGRAPH European Conference on Visual Media Production (CVMP 2018) conference: fast-forward, paper, poster.

It was also presented in posters session at SIGGRAPH 2019 in Los Angeles. You can find the abstract here.

You can also cite my work:

@inproceedings{Tomori:2019:VFT:3306214.3338543,
 author = {Tomori, Juraj},
 title = {VFX Fractal Toolkit: Integrating Fractals into VFX Pipeline},
 booktitle = {ACM SIGGRAPH 2019 Posters},
 series = {SIGGRAPH '19},
 year = {2019},
 isbn = {978-1-4503-6314-3},
 location = {Los Angeles, California},
 pages = {97:1--97:2},
 articleno = {97},
 numpages = {2},
 url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3306214.3338543},
 doi = {10.1145/3306214.3338543},
 acmid = {3338543},
 publisher = {ACM},
 address = {New York, NY, USA},
 keywords = {distance fields, fractals, pipeline, ray marching, vfx},
} 

You can find comparison of various techniques (visual quality vs performance) here.

Resources

• Mandelbulber2 source code repository
• Mandelbulb3D source code repository
• Capturing the infinite universe in "Lucy": fractal rendering in film production
• The fractal nature of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

Thanks

• Íñigo Quílez - great articles on raymarching, fractals, orbit traps, SDFs...
• Krzysztof Marczak - lead Mandelbulber2 developer, supporting via emails
• Mikael Hvidtfeldt Christensen - great articles on raymarching, fractals, generative art
• Dom Penfold - blog with useful articles