Overview / Usage

Rendering Fractals via Ray Marching is one of the most common forms of fractal rendering, but control over folding parameters are often not controllable by the user. This project attempts to create a system that empowers the user with the ability to create and view their own 3-dimensional fractals in real time.

This can be used as a flexible benchmarking tool to benchmark the performance of both hardware and different software rendering approaches, including the effects of implementing accellerations structures such as BVH, BSP, octree, etc, and different rendering methods such as rasterization, ray tracing, ray marching, or other techniques.

Methodology / Approach

I will begin with creating a simple UI with IMGUI and first implementing the rendering using the Ray Marching technique to render basic pre-defined fractals. I will utilize the Intel DPC++ Compiler to parallelize the ray casts whilst maintaining the portability of the code to different hardware. Next, I will develop the UI to design and view custom fractals, giving the user the ability to customize several parameters. Following, I will implement various toggleable acceleration structures to measure their resulting performance with OneAPI's VKL. Finally, I will explore the feasibility of porting the code to use various rendering techniques such as Raytracing or Rasterized Rendering.

Technologies Used

DPC, VKL, C, IMGUI

Repository

https://github.com/branson2015/FractalMarcher