Real-Time Fractal Generation with OpenGL Shaders

I've been wanting to publish this for some time; I recorded me playing around with this program a while ago but didn't upload it right away, so I forgot about it :-).

This program is very similar to the Julia-Set generator I uploaded earlier, but instead of using the CPU for calculating the pixels, this one takes advantage of the massively parallelized computing power of modern graphics cards, in this case my NVidia GeForce GTS 450.

It does this by making use of shaders which were introduced in recent versions of OpenGL. That way you can program the different stages of the rendering pipeline in any way you want. These shaders are C-like programs which are given to the graphics card's driver at runtime where they are compiled and optimized. My program loads the shader programs from text files, so if I want to change the shader, I don't have to recompile the entire program, which makes playing around with the shaders very easy and fun.

The program generates either a Mandelbrot fractal or a Julia set. With a mouse click, you can set the "parameter" of the Julia set. It's quite interesting to see how a position in the Mandelbrot fractal corresponds to a Julia set with the parameter set to that position... I think I'm trying to show that from around 6:45 on. In my opinion it's really fascinating. Maybe it's just retarded, I don't know.

(sorry if I'm a bit inconsistent in my writing, it's almost midnight and I'm tired)

Also, you can zoom around and stuff... when the zoom gets very close, you can see artifacts; the image gets a bit pixel-y. I assume that is because of the limited precision (32 bits) the program is using.

I hope you enjoy the (in my opinion) pretty sights in these fractals. Thanks for watching!

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• computer
• graphics
• opengl
• glsl
• shader
• julia
• set
• mandelbrot
• fractal
• programming

[rinsmaster]

Awesome!

[Benedek93]

@rinsmaster Thank you kindly!

[cgdobrev]

omg want.