Community

The fractal ecosystem

GMT stands on decades of work by a generous community. Here's where to find people and where the techniques came from.

Hubs

r/GMT_fractals

The primary community — share renders, ask questions, request formulas.

r/fractals

Wider 2D and 3D fractal art community. Great for inspiration.

GitHub — gamazama

Source code, issue tracker, contributions.

Related tools

If GMT isn't the right fit for what you're doing, or you want a second set of tools in your workflow, these are the other great 3D fractal renderers.

Mandelbulber

The granddaddy of 3D fractal renderers. Native (C++/OpenCL) with an enormous formula library. GMT borrows ideas and shares formulas where licenses allow.

Fragmentarium

Syntopia's GLSL IDE for fractal art. The .frag format GMT imports comes from here; most of the Workshop library is Fragmentarium-sourced.

Fraktaler 3

Claude Heiland-Allen's deep-zoom Mandelbrot renderer. Reference for high-precision techniques.

Distance Estimator Compendium

Jon Baker's curated catalogue of distance estimator formulas with technical writeups.

Thanks

A handful of people whose support has directly shaped GMT's direction — not just users, but people who've given their time, attention, and care to the project.

moondchan

Detailed review from a 3D-print / manufacturing workflow — shaped the mesh export roadmap and surfaced the formula priorities that working artists actually need.

escapism_only_please

Long-standing support and helping spread the word — the kind of early backing that turns a project into a community.

Credits

GMT is one tool in a long lineage. These are some of the people whose work made it possible. Incomplete by definition — the list of contributors to 3D fractal mathematics is vast.

Daniel White & Paul Nylander

The Mandelbulb formula (2009). Everything else started here.

Tom Lowe

The Mandelbox formula (2010).

Syntopia (Mikael Hvidtfeldt Christensen)

Fragmentarium — the GLSL IDE whose file format is now a lingua franca for distance estimators.

Krzysztof Marczak (buddhi1980)

Mandelbulber project — pioneering many hybrid and folding techniques.

3Dickulus

Curator of an enormous Fragmentarium example collection — source for many Workshop formulas.

Jon Baker (jbaker.graphics)

The Distance Estimator Compendium.

Claude Heiland-Allen

High-precision techniques that inspired GMT's Split-Float system.

The fractal-art community

Decades of discovery, experimentation, and generous sharing that made this whole landscape possible.