Hey everyone,
I was recently made aware of the work of Daniel White and Paul Nylander who constructer a 3D version of the infamous Mandelbrot set and dubbed it the Mandelbulb.
This was the first 3D fractal found with the kind of complexity of the 2D M-Set using hypercomplex numbers in 3 dimensions.
This research is brand new in the fractal world - their discoveries were first made in 2007.
I decided to pursue the Mandelbulb and the idea of being able to render it in flash. Early attempts weren’t great and it turned out the iterations I’d been using were slightly wrong:
http://experimentalized.blogspot.com/2009/11/mandelbulb-first-thoughts.html
(here is a demo of it rendering live in flash).
I wrote a voxel rendering engine to draw the Mandelbulb in 3d, but as you can see the first shapes created had nowhere near the complexity of White and Nylanders fractal.
Today I rewrote the program and have come up with something which does create the Mandelbulb using AS3.
I just rendered a gigavoxel image (1000x1000x1000 voxels - 3d pixels) in about 10 minutes using the program but I plan on creating an explorer capable of looking at the set in lower detail in practically real time, similar to my previous 2d efforts.
Anyway, here is the link to the first renders. Without shadow casting the image does look a bit flat, but I’m happy to have it working and rendering in flash 
