Create Mandelbulb Fractals In Blender Eevee 

"Keep the cube" ... History was made.

That feel when you have to pause and rewind like 50 times each time he does something, because you have no clue how he did any of it. Trying to comprehend this makes me feel like a dog in a chemistry lab.

my dream came true.

Sometimes you find a youtube video that is more useful than the last 100 hundred combined! Like a documentary + a tutorial + a work of art all in one dense but clear form. Amazing overview worthy of sharing many times over.

Even if I'll never replicate what you did here I learned sooo much by watching this. Thank you!

Wow.. You made the tutorial. And you sir are the kind of guy who makes maths look so cool. Thank you. Learnt a lot.

Love that quick rainbow pallet in the colorramp in only four clicks or so.

Its really helpful when you minimize the nodes immediately while filming at high speed.

While this illustrates the strength and potential of eevee, it also shows the node system's weaknesses when it comes to vector maths and arithmetics. Hopefully the everything nodes project will improve the workflow. Thanks for the vid.

I know it's a couple years old now, but this is still mind-blowing to me! Fantastic work. My interest is math modeling with Blender and 3dsmax (I'm currently working mostly with Blender 2.8 now), so stuff like this fascinates me.

One of the first Blender 2.80 tutorials and then already this,amazing.

i like to see more tutorial like this in the future, luv it

To go further you can add two vector math nodes in the beginning between texture coordinate: object and Z, c. Make the first vector math node an add and the second a divide. You can now zoom into the mandelbulb by adding values to the divide node. Make sure you have the same value for the x, y and z axis. If you go to deep you will end up in the mandelbulb itself and you have to adjust the position with the add node to find the surface again. Increase the divide amount just in little steps and then adjust the position for easy navigation. You can even make an animated render where it seems you go across the surface of the mandelbulb and zoom in very deep without changing the position of the camera or the object.

one of the most interesting videos Ive seen lately, I have to try it someday.

This tutorial stands our amongst most other blender tutorials on youtube! Kudos!

I'm a nerd and a blender addict, so this couldn't have been any better

this was so good. I followed your instructions directly and was left with a glitchy cube, so sad to come so close and fail

unbeliavable quality - both content and presentation!

The moment when you plug the colorramp 😍 Thank you for sharing this masterpiece! 👏

Thank you so much. I'll use this for some visuals in a concert, I've always wanted to make a mandelbulb and you're the man.

Very nice video and effects. I like how you made this. Must of been a lot of work :)

Going to give this a try, looks so fun! And thanks for including the blend file!

Wow, this tutorial is truly top-notch. Very nice 👍

it would be so nice to have all the mandelbulb3d (mb3d) tools and formulas, also atmospheric and rim lightning that can be modified after render, all integrated in blender ^^

i just subscribed even tho i honestly have no idea what you were doing the whole time with all that math stuff, like i thought it was gonna involve modeling and stuff but this was cool! hopefully you do more tutorials

Can't wait for the full release of 2.8

Really really awesome. I love your learning technic, specially math and mathematics picture visualization. I think nobody used this technic like math node+ math photo

Great tutorial, easy to follow, fun to build. Thank you.

Funny how it takes in a vector and gives out a vector. The setup also makes it look like a neural network. That's kinda cool.

I'm trying to create the [spoiler creature] from the movie Annihilation. This is the perfect tutorial. Thanks!

i replicated in blender 2.93.1 and it worked! i really liked playing with the variables, thanks a lot for this tutorial

nice musics in background, great choice!!

One of the biggest and outstanding experiment in blender so far! Lets play with this magic, guys)

That was an absolutely great tutorial. How you were able to break down the math of that...wow

that is one of the best node tutorials i've ever seen, thanks a bunch man, amazing, i have a question though, in the blend file you provided: how did you connect the motion of the empty to the value node !!!!!!!!

I'm gonna hafta watch this a couple billion times. Great stuff. How are you getting the morphing tho? Also, have you tried any other formulas, such as Julias?

This is the kick in the butt I needed to finally start learning Blender.

How do you get it that sharp in your renders. Even when I crank all samples up to max, play with the start and end it's still fuzzy.

So that's how they filmed the crazy scenes of The Ant-Man and Dr. Strange I feel like saying thanks for this amazing tutorial would be so cheap! Nevertheless I appreciate your incredible work from the depth of my heart!

I’ve been waiting for someone to do this in Blender for a looooooong time

Hello, thanks for the tutorial, a question, why can not I see the fractal render? Greetings.

thank you now i can look at this when i am tripping at home this will be awesome!!!

I love that you modeled the retro computer but I remember those floppies from back in the day, and you made it go in backwards. :)

looks amazing in blender EEVEE. This is incredible stuff.

I have been doing it in basically the same way! So glad to hear Eevee will be able to handle it in real time so I don't have to do any more 12+ hour renders. Great tutorial :) Btw have you tried doing this with osl? If so is it better or worse in Eevee than recreating the math with nodes?

Amazing... thank you also for the finished blend... hoping to see more!

I followed your tutorial and made the Mandelbulb! It is beautiful! Thanks a lot!!! And it made me reading a lot of crazy math as well!! Just one question, why wouldn’t it work on Cycle???

This looks amazing, I'm definitly going to get right on this next time I'm on blender

So, uhh… this doesn't really work for more complex object, does it? I tried to test it by putting the Material to a human model, but the mandelbulb doesn't show, at all, it's just empty Also, edit mode modification doesn't seem to affect the mandelbulb, or did I do it wrong? I just grab the cube top face way up & move one vertex, but the bulb doesn't follow the change. Did I have to apply transformation first to make it work?

Hey Jonas could you give a bit of an insight on the parameter that steers the color of the mandelbulb? I looked into the blend file, but I cannot get it. I though you're using a distance from original position, but it's not. Any help on that?

I'm really curious to try making this but I have to ask - in your demo animation, is that a mirror modifier applied? Does adjusting that initial value cause it to shift and change?

Thanks so much for this tutorial! Well explained and easily recreatable in Blender 4.0!

OK, all this actually works. And of course, the nodes are compatible with cycles, which can give very nice looking things. But please, try to be more didactic, it took me 5 hours to be sure to have the same thing as what you did.

Amazing final product!

phi is the rotation around the z-axis while theta is the angle of the vector, of length r, from the xy-plane.

For some reason mine looks like a log. Could you help me with this? I downloaded the original blend file and cross checked it with mine, everything looks right. But instead of looking spherical it has become cylindrical.

I don't know if anyone wrote this but the vector math node now has length as an option. Maybe it had that before too, I don't know.. but it's quite useful.

excited to dive into the tutorial. What skin are you using for blender? Looks nice and clean

I took notes on this. Thank you for sharing.

I have a great deal of respect for this -- it is very impressive! One minor criticism, though: why do you take a computationally expensive square root for a value (rho) that will be raised to the nth power? Why not skip the square root and raise it to the n/2? Halving the amount of exponentiation should speed the calculation...

The most wonderful material! Thank you so much for your lesson! The magic begins))

this really is amazing. a bit too complex for me right now as I just started learning 3d two weeks ago, will get there soon ;)

cant wait to see more mathematical object tutorial like this in the future

This is terror inducing

I like that in the file you had some Easter eggs like the output location!

Amazing! When you had the idea to do this, did a Mandelbulb ignite in your head?

Can you replicate in blender 3.0 I followed the steps and also tried downloading the file, both came out wrong thanks

Great tutorial, but is there a way to do all that math in python and just let blender generate all mesh points it needs to render from there? I mean, implementing that equations in python's numpy library is like 8 lines, what you were doing seemed quite complicated, with all those little windows connected together (at least to me, I don't know blender well). I heard that blender is somewhat compatible with python, so I'm just wondering if this is possible...

I’m finally understanding how to read and comprehend the formula, but I’m wondering how to get the parent node groups visible while working on an inner group? Love this video, been trying every day for the past 5 days and think I might actually get it right this time!

There are times where tutorials are so bad that I could be salty of them. I copied tutorials made in maya, mudbox and unity. But you, mate... are the best of them all, beating them with your teaching skills! I am a somewhat beginner of blender and had a LOT of fun with your great tutorial. My blend file is exactly like yours. Now I am experimenting with it, haha. Thank you very much! I hope to see more tutorials made by you because you´re worth every follower who passes by.

Finally, I can now create cool looking fractals.

Learned so much! thanks for the video!! Make more videos. Don't stop making!

Thank you for your time, brutha...your flow is just right and I grasp every step!

If Gleb asked, this must be *g00d* :D

This was excellent, thank you!

excited to do this thanks for posting!!

How would I use the fractal material if I want to displace the geometry and not the volume? I think it wouldn't be so many changes to the shader, but I can't guess *what* changes I should make.

This video is awesome! Thanks! Tho I’m having trouble rendering/ animating it. I’m pretty new to blender and I know this isn’t the best project for a beginner but I just love it

Hi Jonas. Amazing tutorial, could you perhaps do a tutorial on how to transfer more generic / basic math formulas into blender node editor? Much appreciated.

you should use a multiply node with both inputs being the same for the squaring operation , the power node uses more computational power

4:03 your welcome fellow math nerds and blender people

I got to the vector lenght part No idea what happned, you started off making a node group called vector length but then ou renamed it Rho? im confused i dont have a node group called vector length to work with Edit: Never mind i missed like a 2 second part where you made a node group out of rho my fault.

is it possible to do this on a ready made mesh thatactually looks something other than cube ? for example like human head ? That would be dope :D Or does this work only becuase of the vectors and I would need to make new vectors in the shape of human head ?

Hi Jonas, I'm curious, would this be possible in Cycles? Also, can a node other than a volume one be used to create the object?

key for reroute is right clicking :) amazing tutorial btw !!!thank u!

Keep watching the video over and over until you thoroughly understand what he's doing

Just brilliant all the way around! Great tutorial, and putting all this together via math nodes is genius. Thank you!

This is gold. Thank you for sharing.

Math is "boring" ... says noone after watching this video !

You, sir, are totally awesome!

wow great node

First of all, this is one of the coolest things Ive EVER seen done w blender and I want to thankyou for this! secondly, I have a couple of questions for you if you have a minute or two: First of all a specific question of methodology/math: when there are coordinates in an equasion which are separated by a comma, such as in the theta function for z.... well, what does that mean, is it getting multiplied by something? I understand the coordinate system in euclidian space to locate a point but of c here youre using spherical coordinates ... and I guess Im trying to figure out how the z here gets operated on, youve plugged it into the divide by sqrt of x*x + y*y so Im not sure why that is working that way... The other question is much more general: Im totally inspired by this and would love to develope further and want to try to put some of these equasions into shaders bugman123.com/Hypercomplex/ but I see that there are some operations/symbols that dont look to be inside of the math node that are essentially programming operations like iterators presented here in c++ code snippets.... so, might these (for example the first one at the top of the page) be doable in blender? I am struggling with this as Im pretty much NOT a math or coding person but still want to dive in and try nonetheless and would love your thoughts! thanks in advance and keep up the kickass work!

Uhh, you probably won't answer this, but I've been having an interesting problem... So, I downloaded the project (mainly because i'm worried that I might get issues considering the fact I'm not the greatest at math) and the actual render takes around 20 seconds... But the load time is up to 6 minutes. Basically, the render only starts 6 minutes after pressing the render button. Same thing with the viewport render, 6 minutes of blank screen. I'm not sure if it's because you have some monster gpu, or my gpu stinks (I have a gtx 1060 3g [with additional ram installed, 32gb]) but it takes way longer then the video shows. It could be because I'm using the newer one with the archtangent2 node instead of dividing and getting the archtangent. But i'm pretty sure that isn't the issue, cause if I render with cycles the load time is around 2 seconds. Unfortunately the cycles rendering takes a LOT longer then eevee, but if you have any possible explanations, please provide.

hi, i followed through and got servicable bulb, but it is not very dense. I had to fix it by multiplying the whole density at the end. Is there a different point in the process where i can input the density? Also second question, could you hint at which value needs to be manipulated to animate it? Thanks!

I have an issue with this, when I directly download the .blend project and open it in v2.8 and straight away hit shift + z, the mandelbulb does not show and I can only see the lights.

This great!! Thanks for the history lesson as well, I had no idea ;-)

Idk why but i love you ❤️

Woah you're a genius! Thanks for this video :D

Come on man, that's not how floppy disks are inserted. I'm old.

Get this an a medal