mandelbrot-renderer's Introduction

Mandelbrot renderer

What it does

This program renders a series of images from the mandelbrot set, a beautiful fractal with very interesting patterns. If you want to learn more about the mathematics behind it, take a look at the Wikipedia entry. The rendered jpeg images can later be concatenated using any video editor of your choice to create a zooming animation.

How it works

Images are rendered using mainly two parameters, namely the zoom and center. The higher the zoom value, the closer we are zoomed in. The center is a complex number specifying which part of the fractal will be at the image's center. The images are rendered in full hd.

Each pixel's color is determined by how often the function f_c(z)=z²+c can be applied without diverging (i.e. abs(z) < 2.0). These iterations are massively parallelizable and therefore run on the GPU to gain a significant speed boost using NVIDIA CUDA technology. This means you need a CUDA-compatible GPU to be able to run this program.

We later map the number of iterations of each pixel as a hue angle and convert the resulting HSV color to RGB.

Building

A makefile is provided. In addition to a C++ compiler which will be used as a backend by the nvcc NVIDIA CUDA compiler, you of course need nvcc itself. Just run make and the program will be built.

Usage

All images will be dumped to an images folder. Configuration of values like the zoom, center and image dimensions are done in the source code. Just change the values on the top as you see fit.

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