Sunrise Images and Movies

If you use Sunrise to make some nice images or movies, please post them here.

Patrik and Greg Novak made a high-quality rendering of the prograde-retrograde Sbc major merger and entered this into the 2008 NSF Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge, where it got a semifinalist award. The movie features animations of both starlight and gas density, with moving camera work and a background field. It's really quite nice, I must say! You can get it as a good quality 68MB H.264-encoded MP4 file, or the Youtube version below. If you are giving a talk and want to show just the simulation movie, you can use the bare light and gas renderings at full 1200x1200 resolution. Please credit the movie with "Patrik Jonsson, Greg Novak & Joel Primack, UC Santa Cruz, 2008".

Patrik has played around with an implementation of Metropolis Light Transport in Sunrise. Below is a movie of the circumstellar disk in the Pascucci et al 2004 2D benchmark problem rendered both with Metropolis (left pane) and standard Sunrise (right pane), showing that MLT can be much more efficient. The optical depth through the edge-on disk is 100, and normal "forward" Monte Carlo has a very hard time getting signal to the cameras. Also note how the MLT version adapts to the changing viewport so that it always generates ray paths that contribute to the image. The normal version, in contrast, does poorly in the very zoomed in view at the end, because most ray paths are outside of the image.

Animated view of a polar disk galaxy from Brook et al., using Sunrise:

An early video showing a galaxy collision from the point of view of one of the stars, sort of where our Sun would be. It shows starlight with and without dust attenuation, gas and star densities, and bolometric IR luminosity.