A Massive Fractal in Days, Not Years

T. Kim and Duff, T., A Massive Fractal in Days, Not Years, Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques (JCGT), vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 26–36, 2020. Downloads: PDF icon kim2020fractal.pdf
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Abstract: We present a new, numerically stable algorithm that allows us to compute a previously-infeasible, fractalized Stanford Bunny composed of 10 billion triangles. Recent work [Kim 2015] showed that it is feasible to compute quaternion Julia sets that conform to any arbitrary shape. However, the scalability of the technique was limited because it used high-order rationals requiring 80 bits of precision. We address the sources of numerical difficulty and allow the same computation to be performed using 64 bits. Crucially, this enables computation on the GPU, and computing a 10 billion triangle model now takes 17 days instead of 10 years. We show that the resulting mesh is useful a test case for a distributed renderer.