Through some nudges of the community here I am putting in the effort to make myself a new logo, similar to the old but with more “sunlike” qualities. It’s still just a texture mapped sphere but I have been playing with materials and glow and these pictures are what I have so far. Click the image for a bigger version.
Does it look more like a sun? What would you suggest for modification? I am considering adding some more volumetrics comming out of the sun, but that would start to drag out the render times. A note, these pictures were heavily post-processed. I will be adding some sort of backdrop later, probably just stars or a nebula and stars…any suggestions?
humm, thanks for the link but I don’t think I’ll be using PovRay for this. I’m not so sure I actually want a flare comming out of the sun simply for the sake of I want to keep it animatable. I might do so for some of the static logo shots however. Or maby I’ll animate a flare comming off of it…all depends on how much time I have…
Heh. Its looking a LOT better. Keep it up. Although something doesn’t look exactly right. I am not really sure what it is it kinda looks more like a planet covered in lava than a sun.
I don’t know, its hard to do the sun because you can’t look at it. But you could do the sun in an eclipse, then you could do the cornea ( or whatever it’s called ). But otherwise I still like the solar flare idea.
It looks better because it has nice volumetric effects.
It doesn’t look more like a star because it lacks the granularity, but I’ll bet you’re already working on that…
olaf: Interesting how the end result of that tutorial looks quite simaler to what I have at current. I’m fairly satisifyed with the material on the sun, I’ll be plugging away at a corona glow next. After that goes the biggest challenge, a nice big flare.
Here goes the corona glow layer. I fiddled with intesntities, let me know which you like best: (click on the image for a larger version)
I probably will not go with that last one, but it looked interesting so I put it up. The whole thing is still animatable, post work is done in AfterEffects.
This topic is way, way overdue for someone to ask the inevitable question so I will be the one to ask it :
How did you do that ??
(have not read the tutorial link from olaf yet)
I think the second image (from your last post) looks more realistic but I also think it needs a few of those high-intensity bright white explosions from the first image, only much smaller (at the size they are it looks like it’s about to go nova !).
By the corona, are you referring to the large “atmosphere” that extends quite considerably far above the surface ? If so, I can’t really see this (monitor brightness and contrast full up), which is probably realistic but making it brighter might be nice. If not (I always forget which layers of the sun are called what) then you have no problems.
How did I do it? It is a texture mapped sphere (with two layers on the bump and three on the color and and another two on the emit) with a glow filter applied to it. Then I have another pass with volumetric lamps in the middle of the sun plus a different set of geometry to break up the output (could also be achived with applying a texture to the lamps). I composited this pass (which is grayscale) over the sun pass with “add” and then re-mapped the colors, played with unsharp mask to increase the intensity a little, and viola! A sun!
The corona effect (yes, the “atomsophere”) is the streaks comming off the sun. I wanted to also distirubte it more evenly but then I couldn’t get the proper effect with having both a nice glow and the streaks…everything kept getting white in the end. Here is a good reference picture. Keep in mind that this too is a composite of two different kinds of imageing systems; an oxygen emmision sensor is what is giving the corona, a visible light sensor (I think) is what is giving the sun in the middle. So this is not how the sun would appear using a normal telescope with the appropriate filters.
Heh. Its looking a LOT better. 
Keep it up. Although something doesn’t look exactly right. I am not really sure what it is it kinda looks more like a planet covered in lava than a sun.
