Thanks a|x. I'm planning on writing a general OpenCL raytracer for these fractals. I'm not sure if double precision is supported on all GPU hardware yet, although that might just be a driver issue.

The ambient occlusion is simulated with a couple of techniques:
1) during the fractal iteration the minimum distance from the origin of the triplex number (3 component complex number) is used as a darkening factor.
2) the ratio of the number of steps to step limit that is required to reach intersection of the fractal surface is also used, which helps bring out some of the finer details.

The nice thing is that both these techniques don't require any real overhead but pack a significant punch in improving rendering quality.

I just love this - been watching progress with keen interest. Thanks for sharing (and hello from Glasgow too!).

Impressive! But I wanna go deeeeper!!

Amazing!
something like this would be awesome in stereoscopic 3D

Very cool, the polygon count must be huge.

It's a nightmare monster version of grandma's lacework

reminds me one of my dreams