Maya models 'incandescence' by pumping flat cartoon color into an object to mimic light radiating equally in all directions, but it looks like from this photo that even a radiant ball like the sun actually has falloff at the edges.
Maybe Maya should build in a 'facing ratio' light contribution option.
photo credit: (NASA/Thierry Legault)
The little dot the gray arrow points to is actually the space shuttle.
UPDATE
...although when I 32-bit HDR-dim-down a finely-smoothed Platonic solid emitter in Maxwell, I see no signs of falloff. So maybe what I see in the sun photo is due to something other than how many rays from a given area get sent toward the camera.
You make it look so easy. Granted, it's far easier than it would be by hand, but still... I just wish I had half the talent shown on your site. I'd be a photoshop wizard...
Thank you :)
I wonder if you render this image of yours to a 32-bit floating point file, then dim it in comp, until the glow has become all black. Would the sphere light source resembles the above photograph better?
The fall-off darker edge in the photo, could it be just some kind of optical effect?
I don't think the sun is a "a finely-smoothed Platonic solid emitter" :P
But rather has some "asymmetry" to the way light is emitted from the sun.
Compare with a SSS material in maxwell. Asymmetry there means that when light coming from inside the volume interacts with particles they can have a bias to which direction they take next. -0.5 Asymmetry in Maxwell means the light is more likely to travel forward after a collision (like a spotlight's cone) rather than disperse randomly like a sphere.
If the sun has some negative asymmetry it means light generated by fusion at some depth into the sun (Not surface generated light.) will not spread in a perfect diffuse way. But rather emit more light in the normal direction. Thus parts of the sun at an angle to the camera will appear darker.
I did some tests in Maxwell, it showed that a negative asymmetry does produce said effect. Setup was a spherical emitter inside another sphere with thin-SSS material.
Hope the explanation is good enough!
I'd be happy to discuss it further.
/Boojah
I'm not sure the behavior of the particles before they reach the surface is important. I don't think you could see them. However - you may be exactly right. I don't know. Food for thought.
I'm looking forward to playing with the new thin surface SSS in Maxwell 2.0 - I want to make some 1950's fiberglass shade lamps, similar to
http://www.meteorlights.com/patterns.htm
http://www.moonshineshades.com/
Yeah hard to know, I'll ask a physicist at the university some day. (By the way, here's a great article on the sun: http://www.howstuffworks.com/sun.htm)
I actually had a lamp project that called for some thin SSS just recently. I didn't have V2 then so now I'm working to make it just like it should be done!
It'll be really interesting to see what kind of great lamps you'll create. Those meteor light patterns looks like fun!
Oh, and your blog is great thank you!
Thanks :)
I'm actually trying to pust some fiberglass density images together in anticipation of my project with the fiberglass lamp shades. I'm assembling them here on flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/digitalartform/sets/72157622680579772/