I’m trying to make a simulation of the sun’s surface, need suggestions. The video is compressed so it has lost a good amount of detail though, I’m still not happy with the way it looks. Right now I’m using Blender 2.49 and just animating textures on a surface.
Please any help you can give would be appreciated. I would really like to figure out a way to make streamers, as there would be on the Sun, but I have no idea how to do that. Thanks for any Ideas you have, or help.
Here is the Video:
I took a stab at creating a corona with tendrils. The results are not that great, but it may be something you can modify? Basically I added musgrave texture node to the composite output and use the glow alpha to mask it out. This causes some of the musgrave noise to appear in the corona space around the sphere. If only BLENDER could do projection modes in a spherical pattern for node textures it might be able to b e improved upon? But I offer it up as a starting point for anyone.
ras_Sun_1e.blend (455 KB)
Atom, I might give that a try. Though I’m starting to think the only way to go is with volumetric s , though last time I tried that it was wayyy slow to render. I agree about the spherical projection.
Yeah, I agree, but we need spherical volumes and Blender only seems to support cube based volumes at this time. 3DSMax supports spherical volumes and you can do nice sun work in that application.
Yes this is true, there hasn’t been enough work in this area, essentially blender is still using 2d projection in a 3d application. Also most of the textures only scale from 0 to 2.0 which just isn’t enough for a lot of animation problems.
Here is a new animation of where I am so far, I might be able to improve it slightly more. This one uses a completely different technique to achieve it though.
Only time the surfice of the sun was got right, ever, was during the 2007 sunshine.
I was finally able to get something realistic, actually I looks great. It even appears as though there are streamers, thought they do not arc back onto the surface of the sun as I would like. Really it is meant to be seen animated, stills really do not look quite right. Still need to make it perfectly spherical, but that shouldn’t be a problem.
Anyway I will upload a video soon. Here is a still of it.
Well really if you’re going for any sort of realistic look, the sun would be just pure white.
But if you’re having some kind of sunlight filter in the scene, then you should really take a look at some stills from the movie Sunshine, by Danny Boyle. It’s a great movie, but I have a link to a clip of it here that should show you a good spot to aim for.
Thank you for the link LazyCoder. I would love to be able to make that, I just don’t think It is possible in Blender Yet. As Blenders materials are only 2d, and the size of the fractal is very limited. It might be possible with Volume I don’t know, I haven’t moved on to 2.50 yet. Actually I am doing it this way because I’m Making an animation where there will be objects around the sun.
there was someone who made a pretty cool sun in one of the Blender art magazine issuse perharps you should have a look at that, I can’t remember the issuse number but it was a good looking sun
Thanks for the tip, I’ll check it out.
It was issue number 21. I made an animation with a sun-like object, but it wasn’t meant to be realistic or exactly like a sun. You can check it out at http://vimeo.com/8131765. The sun in Blender Art Magazine looks a lot better than mine.
