Hi Terrence,
You likely saw a presentation where I showed some mandelbox and mandelbulb renderings. I used a mel expression to create a mandelbrot texture but the 3d stuff was done by coding a custom texture for a Maya fluid node, which is not possible for users. However there is an excellent program for exploring the 3D mandelbox interactively here(source included):
http://www.ms.mff.cuni.cz/~kadlj3am/big/boxplorer/
Also www.fractalforums.com has lots of info on generating these structures.
I don’t think you will have much luck generating a mandelbox with a mel script… it is too much geometry. Not only is it too much geometry for a script, but too much to keep all in memory at once. The more typical way of doing it is through a volume render, which is what I did. I compiled in custom code in my local build of Maya, something users can’t do… and the fluid rendering does not have an open enough api to use for this currently. Basically as the ray is marching forward one evaluates the mandelbox function at points to determine if they are in or out as well as what the color is. At no point are there any triangles.
At any rate I would post your questions on fractalforums.com. If anyone knows of good resources for this these folks will.
Duncan
Unfortunately, Boxplorer doesn't seem to work anymore but I still can't believe he even replied. I'm soooo glad he did though. Now I know for sure that it isn't possible in Maya.
But! Doesn't mean I can't make something that is inspired by the Mandelbox... Never give up, never surrender! :)
