I've finally done it. After almost 2 years of contemplation and constantly postponing it, I finally got around to using MandelBulb3d. This is an application made by the same developer that made JWildFire, my favorite fractal app so far. But MandelBulb3d takes fractal design to the next... dimension, both literally & metaphorically: the fractals are three-dimensional now, with light sources and shadows and all the weird geometry you would expect.

This is my first try after some hours of experimentation.

I spent some time to get to know the formulas, there are dozens of those, and you can combine up to six together, so the combinations are ... too many to count, right!? I found just two formulas for my first 3d fractal, put them together, and this is what I came up with:

You see all those numbers & dials & panels & buttons? Well, that's not even the half of what there is in total! You see now why I've been avoiding this app, eh?

Anyway, the rest of the story is my boring attempts to find the proper camera position, angle object color, ambient color, shadows, intensities, etc, etc. This is the result of the final render at high resolution and quality:

I also did a render of the "Z-Buffer", an greyscale image that has 3d information: whiter areas are nearer to the camera, while darker areas are furhter away; the deep distance is total black. This is very useful for image processing in GIMP, it can be used as distance-mask so that the effects are applied more to the whiter areas.

After a while of color corrections and minor post-processing, this is the final image:

The Forbidden Fruit

by @nyarlathotep
A fractal made in Mandelbulb3D