DX11 DirectCompute Buddhabrot & Nebulabrot

[Stefan]

DX11 DirectCompute Buddhabrot & Nebulabrot Renderer

I wrote a DX11 DirectCompute implementation of the famous Buddhabrot fractal. The implementation is an extension of my earlier Mandelbrot fractal DX11 DirectCompute program (http://www.yakiimo3d.com/2010/02/02/directcompute-mandelbrot-fractal-viewer/). I also use my Rheinhard tonemapping code (http://www.yakiimo3d.com/2010/03/13/dx11-directcompute-global-operator-photographic-tonemapping/) to bring the HDR Buddhabrot color values into the LDR framebuffer's [0,1] range. It's good that I used code from my old demos because I found and fixed bugs in my tonemapping code and also realized I had forgotten to upload the source and binary for my DX11 Mandelbrot demo to CodePlex (doh!).

Regular Buddhabrot renderings result in monotone achromatic images because the same single value is written to each RGB channel. The Nebulabrot is a simple extension to the Buddhabrot, where you plot the Buddhabrot 3 times with a different iteration exit max value, and assign each of the 3 iteration plots to a different RGB channel (In an actual implementation, you can render the 3 iteration exit max value plots in one draw by just using if branches.) Since the implementation is easy and the resulting renders are more interesting, my Buddhabrot implementation supports Nebulabrot renderings as well.

As usual, a CodePlex link for my Buddhabrot program's source code and binary are provided near the end of the article.