Our raytracer is capable of rendering Mandelbrot fractals on the fly, calculating whether a ray intersects or not based on the position of intersection with the plane of the fractal. As you can see, this allows nearly unlimited zooming on the fractal primitive, with greater detail appearing constantly. In the images above, a sphere is used to magnify the edge of the fractal. The spotlights were created by putting point lights inside of hollow cones. The attached animation was created by running a ray file through a simple perl script, which modified various positional terms and output a large number of constructed ray files, each of which was then rendered in turn. It took about 3 hours to render in idle cycles on a 13 CPU linux cluster.
-Justin Husted
