Fractals3D is a c++/qt4 project which generates 3 dimensional fractals. It applies the normal fractal math but, since it uses quaternions instead of complex numbers, it has the 3rd dimension to display (actually it would have a 4th dimension too, but it is discarded).

This project was developed by me, Lorenzo Bossi, and my friend Stefano Massera as project for the final examination of the Computer Graphics class during our Master degree in Computer Science. It was intended to be a sort of "extension" of the Fractals ;) project, but it shares almost no code with it.

The code requires only QT4 and OpenGL, but it uses some gcc not standard extensions.

It is tested on linux with QT 4.8.6 and g++ 4.8.2. It used to work on windows too using an old mingw, to compile it with vc++ the code needs some minor modification that I'll plan to do in the next future.

To make the project move in the src directory and execute the following commands:

$ qmake
$ make
$ make install

note that the last command does not really install the program (therefore no root privileges are required) but it just copies in the bin directory the executable and all the files it needs to work.

The code itself is not really well documented and contains a lot of Italian comments. I'm sorry for this issue.

The program has 2 different engines to render the fractals (plus one dummy used only for test):

• Static: which compute the fractal in CPU and renders it as a 3D texture;
• Dynamic: which reprograms the video shaders to render better fractals;