The Mandelbulb

I produced a rendering of the Mandelbulb fractal, a 3D analogue of the Mandelbrot set. Features added:

• Ray Marching / Sphere Tracing: Implemented in src/SDFObject.cpp (intersect method). This allows for rendering implicit surfaces defined by a distance function.
• Mandelbulb SDF: Implemented the distance estimator for the Mandelbulb fractal (power 8) in src/SDFObject.cpp (map method).
• SDFObject Class: A new Object subclass in include/SDFObject.h and src/SDFObject.cpp that integrates into the existing ray tracing pipeline.
• JSON Parsing: Updated include/read_json.h to parse “mandelbulb” objects from scene files.

Acknowledgements

• Mandelbulb formula and distance estimator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbulb
• Sphere Tracing algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_tracing