Rice Ball LAB

Wanna know how to make these? It's really easy with Mandelbulb 3D.

Mandelbulbs are 3D versions of Mandelbrot fractals. The free program Mandelbulb 3D is a program that lets you generate these.

If you wanna install the program right away and have a look for yourself, you can download it here.

MB3D doesn't require any installation. Once you start the .exe file contained in the downloaded folder, you are greeted by this screen:


What you see is a classic 2d fractal. in order to actually see what the preset looks like, click the "Calculate 3D"-button. You can't miss it.


This weird pine cone is good and all, but that's not what you're here for, is it?
Let's get some presets then. You can look for presets yourself, but alexius, the creator of romantically apocalyptic (check out his webcomic on rom.ac it's really good) generously gave away a pretty cool preset for a cyberpunk city on his tutorial about creating cyberpunk cities.

copy the gibberish that you can find in the description of his tutorial to your clipboard and click on open from clipboard:




 Again, press calculate 3D. this one might take a little longer than the previous one. If you want to have shorter rendering times, reduce the resolution next to the "from clipboard" button.


 Now we get to the part where things start to actually look different from the tutorial.
To change your render, you have 3 options.

1. Use the navigator to fly around in the fractal
2. Change the parameters in the right subwindow manually
3. Mutate (randomize) the parameters

 If you click on "Navigator" in the top left corner, a window like this will open:

 Click on insert parameters, formula and light to insert the respective variables from your main window into the navigator. Normally, just inserting parameters is enough. If your view doesn not look like the render, don't worry. The lighting is simplified in the navigator to reduce rendering time. If you really can't see anything, try restarting the program and loading the parameters again.

 Click on the image in the navigator and use your mouse to look and fly around like in any videogame. the controls are also listed on the bottom of the window. Once you are done, left click again to get your mouse pointer back.



 Now click on "View to main" and switch to the main window, then "Calculate 3D" again to see the image in its full glory. 


Yay, the blue glow is back! If you like this image, you can render it again with a higher resolution, or save it right away.

If you want something else entirely, click on the "MutaGen" button. 


You don't need to change the mutation values and can just click "Mutate". This will take a while. 
If you see a fractal you like among the results, right click it and send it to the main window. You know what comes next. Recalculate the fractal now and/or use the navigator to look for a nice shot.
If you just take a look around in the navigator, even the blue screens you might get can turn out to have a nice scenery just out of view, so give them a chance as well.


This should get you started pretty well. Have fun!  G o   w i l d !