True 3D IFS fractals and beyond…

Inspired by 90’s demoscene productions, Chaotica mastermind Thomas Ludwig discovered a lifelong path in computer graphics. After an internship at Lionhead Studios and role as lead graphics developer at Virtual Spectator New Zealand, he contributed to LuxRender with the author of Octane Render before joining Glare Technologies in 2010, where he developed Indigo Renderer and Chaotica Fractals.

At Stochastic, Thomas has been investigating new methods for generating and rendering 3D fractals, beginning with true 3D IFS fractals.

Further investigations will combine aspects of IFS fractals with Density Estimation (DE) based fractals such as the Mandelbulb, in a GPU-based Monte Carlo path tracer. The resulting new class of fractals will have a large creative space, and the example implementation will be released as opensource.