solar surface/flares.

[super gnu]

any thoughts on wether phoenix could handle some solar flares? see this video for inspiration. id likely want something a bit faster and more punchy (that stuff is, obviously, amazing - but too sedate for my purposes)

idea is to emit "plasma" from a surface, and have it follow the random looping forms as seen in the sun, and "grounding out" in a specified area.

i imagine path following is fairly trivial, but creating a flexible randomised "magnetic field" to warp and pull the fire into multiple, shifting threads like that, might be rather tricky.

[super gnu]

agh!, forgot the video link, and no edit in this forum:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tmbeLTHC_0

[Ivaylo Katev]

i have tried once to do this, but was unable to achieve the same result. my idea was to use a map with negative and positive areas, to modulate the discharge of a source and to run the simulation without gravity. the result was similar but not realistic enough.
technically this is a plausible way, the magnetic field has very similar to the fluids math, except the mass. i think some drag particles can increase the chance dramatically, my attempt was before we have them. let see what can be achieved

[Ivaylo Katev]

very promising result until now, will post an image later

[Ivaylo Katev]

unfortunately the attempt failed (again), see the attached file, it gives some hope, but is not that must be

[Neilg]

I'd probably try and do this with a particle flow/tp for the loops that shift around. maybe some phoenix for the solar flares and a massive amount of postwork/passes to layer them up.

[Paul Oblomov]

I wonder, if we can move the fluid with lots of splines ?

[super gnu]

I'm trying to do it with pflow, but out of the box it's not really capable. I can emit streams of particles based on a spotty map, and get them to loop up and back to a target, but getting them to stay as streams and hit points on a surface is eluding me at the moment. Only options for find target are "random" and the particles scatter from their streams and hit all over the target, or "nearest point" which is better, but all the streams converge to the nearest point with no control. There is a "script vector" option, that I believe you can use to create a "find target by greyscale map" with a bit of work, but I cannot see how you would tell the streams to remain cohesive and go to one point on the map each.

I could maybe spawn multiple particle systems to deal with this, but for my purposes, I need a relatively simple system to set up and control, as it will be repeated many times, on different geometry, and be a small part of a large project. Any suggestions most appreciated, if phoenix could do it (or close enough) it would be a good justification for a purchase. Ivaylo , do you have a video of your best result? I don't phoenix installed...

[Ivaylo Katev]

I wonder, if we can move the fluid with lots of splines ?

perhaps this is the most reliable way

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

unfortunately the attempt failed (again), see the attached file, it gives some hope, but is not that must be

Does the sphere itself have some attraction to it, apart from the source texmap? Maybe this should help keep the smoke inbound. Or maybe just if the texmap can have more and larger negative discharge regions than positive ones?

[super gnu]

not knowing very much about phoenix, but looking at that test video, seems to me you need a) smaller emission areas, clustered in groups, for more threadlike jets b) animated attractive areas so the loops shift around and c) way larger forces, both positive and negative.. the sun is not a gentle place. other than that i think it has potential.


ive got some way further with pflow, but its so mindbendingly slow once you start getting further into a setup. makes tweaking very painful.

[Ivaylo Katev]

Does the sphere itself have some attraction to it, apart from the source texmap? Maybe this should help keep the smoke inbound. Or maybe just if the texmap can have more and larger negative discharge regions than positive ones?

no additional forces, only the negative discharge areas.
i think not the main problem is the "lazy" behavior of the fluid, some streams are caught by the negative sources, that's ok, but the ones who are not continue to the space in smoke-like way, that is not typical for the sun crown.
i'm 90% sure with more attempts and investigating references it can be done by simulation, but it isn't worth