Sun Maps?

[richardjoly]

http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/sol.php

You might like those too:

Planetary maps:
http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_set.php?categoryID=2355
http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/
http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/earth.php
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/spaceart/cylmaps.html
http://www.mmedia.is/~bjj/planetary_maps.html

[3DArtZ]

Hey Richard, thanks for the links.
I had seen some of these previous in my search.
Have not found anything suitable for the job at hand....
oye....

[plsyvjeucxfw]

The sun's pretty dynamic. Would an animated procedural like Marble work?

[juanxer]

What kind of image would you need? Perhaps one of those turbulent bubbling surface of the sun-type ones? How close would you get to its surface?

[3DArtZ]

This is a very odd and ill concieved project that I have to work on. Against my suggestions, the client wants to have some form of displacment on the surface of the Sun. The reason being is that it will be part of a plastic set that we will be prototyping.
So, one could imagine that if the sun was instantly frozen, what would the surface be(other than cold lol).
I would imagine it might be similar to the surface of the ocean if it were instantly frozen.
So, blah blah blah out of my mouth, but the end result is that I need a detailed map that I can use to drive some displacment.
Im finding some images that I might be able to stitch together to use for this.
Thanks for suggestions everyone.
Mike

[renegadespirit]

I've often used a map of Venus to fake a sun map.

If it doesn't need to be dynamic, this trick can be very convincing.

Maher

[3DArtZ]

Maher, thanks for the suggestion. I actually was thinking about using a distorted map of jupiter but maybe venus is better.
Thanks!
Mike

[interstellar]

Hi Mike,

I've just produced a project involving the sun. You can see a thumbnail of it here:

http://www.joetucciarone.com/RedGiant.mov

I did it in EIAS v6.5.2; the only extra plugin you need is Mondo Clouds for the sun's animated surface texture. If you're interested, let me know and I'll email the project to you.

Joe Tucciarone

[juanxer]

It looks absolutely gorgeous!

[richardjoly]

Joe, that is really impressive. :bowdown:
What was that for if I may ask?
It would be extremely instructive to have a description of your technique in a PDF form. Unless you would like to do a full step by step video... Which would also be OK...

[AzOne]

Hi Joe,

1. Wow! That needs to be in the EIAS gallery.
2. A short tutorial please :)

Thanks.

[rtrowbridge]

Very cool animation. I know we're kind of hijacking this thread, but I would third the request for a tutorial on that.

Nice job.

[3DArtZ]

Joe, that's some very nice looking work you've done!

Thanks for offering the material, I apprciate it!
I have found a map that will do the job!
I also would be interested on a quick rundown on your project, I espicially like the surface effect on your sun!

Mike Fitz
www.3dartz.com (http://www.3dartz.com)

[interstellar]

Hi Gang,

Thank you all for your nice comments on my sun animation! I'm in "over my head" with projects right now but I'll put together a recipe for this project, hopefully in a week or so.

Richard, you asked what this animation was for . . . last summer I did a set of animations for a National Geographic documentary. One of them depicted our sun in the far future, swelling into a red giant and swallowing the Earth. I liked it so much I wanted to do a version for my own portfolio. The clip I did for Geographic used the Crumple shader (animating the x and z values) as the sun's animated surface texture. However, the lawyers at Geographic said my version had to be altered significantly, so I used Mondo Clouds as the animated surface for my sun. I'm glad they insisted, because I like my version better than what I did for them!

Joe T

[interstellar]

Hi Everyone,

I finally have some time to make my sun project available. I've broken my original EI project into 9 files, each one representing a render-pass. I also have the After Effects file that brings the rendered passes together so you can see how the animation was generated.

I'd be happy to email the files to anyone who wants to see them; the 10 files take up 1.8 Megabytes, so it wouldn't be too horrendous. If I had any technical skills, I'd put the files where you could download them or produce an instructional video. Alas, I don't have those skills!

Sincerely,

Joe Tucciarone

[richardjoly]

Joe,
Please send them to rick@eias3d.com I am very curious to see your setup.
Thank you for making those available.

[rtrowbridge]

Joe and Richard,

Any chance of hosting these files at EIAS3D for those of us who are hesitant to post our email address publicly? I would really like to see these as well.

Thanks,

Ross

[interstellar]

Hi Ross,

I'd be happy to post my project files somewhere, if I knew where and how to do it!

Joe T

[futagoza]

Hi Joe,

you can try free services like MediaFire (http://www.mediafire.com/).

Regards
Stefan

[richardjoly]

Joe, I just wanted your permission before making them available.
I will post the link tomorrow (Jan 26)
Thank you for sharing.

[interstellar]

Hi Richard,

Please feel free to post the files! The projects use nothing but uberspheres, glow-lights, Smokers and Mondo Clouds but let me know if you have any questions about them. Remember, they were all created on a G5 using EIAS version 6.5.2.

Best,

Joe T

[richardjoly]

http://www.rdnmultimedia.com/eias/JoeT's_Sun_maps.zip

[AzOne]

Thanks Joe and Richard.
Just unzipped the archive and opened a project file. Wow, that's a lot of smokers used, Joe :)
Great stuff!

[interstellar]

Hi Aziz,

Yes, there are a lot of Smokers and glow lights! However, I find that a lot of detail makes an animation look believable. Other folks seem to agree because my stuff is being included in several more National Geographic documentaries!

Sincerely,

Joe T

[juanxer]

I think I haven't touched Smokers since EIAS v2.0. Yours look beautiful, and they render nearly instantaneously in my lowly Mac Pro! I'm so going to play with them from now on :)

[dieGolum]

Thank you very much Joe,

The documentation is very interesting and I learned a lot.

congratulations for your work.

thank you Richard for upload it.;)

Cheers

Diego

[interstellar]

Hi Diego,

You are very welcome, and I'm glad you found my files useful.

Sincerely,

Joe T

[dieGolum]

Hello Joe, please could you share how you did the background of twinkling stars?:)

[interstellar]

Hi Diego,

The starfield was produced using the "Big Dipper" plugin from Northern Lights. I actually didn't make the stars twinkle; they only seem to twinkle because of the compression I applied to the clip. Also, the clip you see was scaled down from my original 1920x1080 clip and this has caused the fine details (the star) to suffer.

Sincerely,

Joe T

[dieGolum]

Hi Joe,

I see now that is a compression "effects"
Joust now I'm involved in an animation that the client wants to come from very far away to the planet earth through galaxies, nothing very scientific, please, do you know if with Big Deeper, galaxies can be create and navigate through them?

sorry so many questions;)

Cheers
Diego

[interstellar]

Hi Diego,

No problem at all! Big Dipper has an option (called "galaxy") to produce a galaxy-shaped pattern of stars. Unfortunately, a Big Dipper galaxy doesn't have gas clouds so it won't look like the photograph of a real galaxy. Also, if you approach Big Dipper stars, they don't get bigger.

If you simply want to approach a galaxy but not pass through it, then you could paste the photograph of a real galaxy on a plane and make sure the plane faces your camera as your camera moves through space. You can easily obtain permission to use Hubble Space Telescope images for this. Choose a galaxy from the Hubble collection and (using Photoshop) arduously delete the foreground stars.

A few years ago, I created an edge-on galaxy using a whole bunch of textured uberspheres. Some uberspheres had reddish and bluish colors (representing the bright nebulae). These "bright" spheres had a pretty substantial edge transparency so they didn't look like hard marbles. Other uberspheres were not luminous but used the "Clouds" Shader as a "clip" map (to produce dark shreds of nebulosity). You have to use a lot of spheres to make this look convincing, and you have to be sure to animate the transparency of any spheres you pass through into invisibility just before your camera runs into them. Behind all these bright and dark spheres, I had two large, orange-ish flattened spheres (with a big edge transparency) representing the galactic nucleus. This project took a huge amount of tweaking, but once I was done it produced a beautiful flythrough. If you look at my demo-reel:

http://www.joetucciarone.com/demo_reel.mov

the last clip (the one under my telephone number and email address) is the flight through my 3d galaxy. Here's a case in which Big Dipper can produce a terrific, fly-through starfield. I laboriously placed a bunch of lights (with glow enabled and illumination disabled) among my uberspheres. When properly set, these glow-lights makes great stars.

You could use Big Dipper to quickly make this "flythrough" starfield in which stars DO get bigger and brighter as you approach them. Instead of choosing "points" in the Big Dipper plugin, you choose "models". Then you parent a colored, low-polygon ubersphere to this Big Dipper, set it's Diffuse Falloff to about 6, tell Big Dipper to generate a bunch of models, and attach a light to your camera to illuminate the spheres. The only problem here is that Big Dipper randomly distributes stars and you don't want any of them to land on the edge of one of your many dust and nebula uberspheres.

The distant galaxies at the end of my demo-reel are Hubble images on planes (with stars Photoshopped-out).

Sincerely,

Joe Tucciarone

[dieGolum]

wow! Joe, stunning images that you have on your website, I like the acrylic paint, very good handling of light and colors especially those in exploding stars.

Many thanks for your extensive and precise explanation. I will try with the photoshoped Hubble images and also I will try the module Mograph of C4d to create a navigable set of stars, and then import to EIAS, the camera will fly close to the sun, so I will use the technique that you've shared, I have not AGShadders, but I can try to a-Fraktal or NX, in June when the work is published I will share it here, so you can see if I've been a good student;)

Thank you very much and congratullation for your work.

Cheers
Diego

[interstellar]

Hi Diego,

Thank you very much for your nice comments on my images, and I look forward to seeing your work.

Sincerely,

Joe T

[juanxer]

Possibly much could be achieved via multiplane animation in After Effects or such. I remember Carl Sagan's Cosmos series's space scenes, which I believe were achieved via multiplane animation of space artwork. It had some beautiful angled vistas of the Milky Way:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCaMFBtU0SE&feature=related
(starting around minute 4:50)

[dieGolum]

Hola Juanxer,

Great moments spent with Carl Sagan walking through the space :)

I like very much this "3D Falloff" layers in AE from Video Copilot, I've used a lot and gives very good results in multi plane animation.
http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/3d_falloff/

here an example of a work I did for a website intro animation, everything is made with only one loop in EIAS and the rest is all in AE with the Video Copilot "3D Fallof" preset.
www.imago-d.com/Fabricanet/FabricaNet.mov (http://www.imago-d.com/Fabricanet/FabricaNet.mov)

Cheers
Diego

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