I Made 3D FRACTALS In Unity!

this awesome looking shape is called a mandelball you could keep zooming into it literally forever and would still find new things only really limited by the speed of your graphics card and this isn't the only one that exists all it takes is some maths and you can make a huge variety of different 3d fractals like this one so where did these come from in 1980 benuet benuit mandelbrot discovered the infinite 2d fractal called the mandelbrot set fast forward to 2007 a bloke called daniel white wanted to find out if a 3d version exists so dan and a number of people from the fractal forums used some relatively simple maps and finally discovered the closest thing we can get to the 3d version the mandelbulb so now let's look at how some other 3d fraxels are made at the lowest level we can render a basic 3d shape we can add a translation and repeat this over and over this is one of the simplest types of 3d fractal the one we made here is called a menger sponge we can do this with pretty much any shape we want this one is called a sipinski tetrahedron because it's made from tetrahedrons whilst these are already cool you kind of know what to expect with them so how do you make these super alien looking fractals let's start with the mandrel box that i showed you and use that as the base of our fractal we can add a spherical fold add an x-axis rotation then add a z-axis rotation all of a sudden we have something pretty complex looking and if i had nasa's supercomputer we could keep zooming into it for a long time and keep finding detail we can also morph the fractals in real time as we're flying around them so how is this massive amount of detail possible to render while still keeping a reasonable frame rate for that we have to explore the technique used to render them you're probably aware that most games used many different triangles to render a whole object this is called rasterization because of the amount of detail in 3d fractals it would be unreasonable to have to render that many triangles and you don't want someone sitting there just modeling the same thing over and over forever they're ended using something completely different called ray marching first we cast a ray out from the camera we check for objects to draw by drawing an imaginary circle around the ray as we get closer to an object the circle gets smaller when it gets smaller than some distance we define it draws the object this is done many times until the whole object is drawn as we make the threshold for the circle lower and lower the fractals become more and more detailed until some point where it slows down so much that it we can tell the raymarcher the shapes to draw using something called a distance function this is what makes ray marching so good for rendering fractals we can just tell it to follow some rules and to repeat them over and over no triangles necessary because of how different it is from rasterization ray marching has a bunch of other coordinates it can do at basically no performance cost like render an infinite amount of a shape and blend shapes together even with ray marching trying to increase the detail too much still makes the fps go to hell i was asking myself this question when i was building my own renderer for these so let's create a public material i saw these amazing looking renderings that seemed to go on forever and i was wondering how i could make them myself because you know after some googling i found out that these super complex animations can actually take weeks to render that's when i stumbled upon the fractal forums which i mentioned at the beginning of the video it's literally a whole community dedicated to talking about these things and making them let's look at some creations of the members [Music] so this all looks really cool but why should we care about these in the first place well it turns out fractals have a lot to do with nature on a small scale trees cauliflower our own body at a bigger scale solar systems galaxies even our universe at its biggest scale kind of looks like a fractal we subconsciously see them everywhere it's a glimpse we can get into infinity born too late to explore the world too early to explore space but just in time to stare into your monitor for hours looking at fractals if you're interested in making and exploring these yourself no programming experience necessary a member of the fractal forums made a program called mandelbalber quick thank you to codeparade who made his fractal renderer open source it was used for some clips in the video thanks for sticking this far see you again soon

Channel: Braian Strak

Views: 28,745

Keywords: 3D Fractals, Fractals, 3D Fractal, Mandelbulb, Mandelbrot, Unity, Unity Game Engine, Unity Game Development, Unity Indie Development, Mysterious

Id: AOIFUDFToFs

Length: 4min 34sec (274 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 23 2022