Rendering stars

[Przemyslaw.Gruchala]

Hello

 

I am programmer for 27 years, mostly in 3d graphics, games and ray-tracing visualizations of real world.

 

Recently I started experimenting with simulating universe, rendering stars using star database that are freely available in the Internet.

 

So far I came up with rendering Sirius, Orion, Betelgeuse stars which you can see below, renders and animation:

 

Rendering in 3d without motion blur (zoom in to see stars):

 

Full resolution is 2048 x 2048.

 

Betelgeuse is pretty much in the center of this image.

 

http://www.ultimate-theory.com/Graphics/Stars%201.png

 

 

Rendering in 3d with motion blur:

 

http://www.ultimate-theory.com/Graphics/Stars%202.png

 

 

Animation 360 degree (it was rendered, 60 frames image sequence, in 4h on 8 cores computer)

 

http://www.ultimate-theory.com/Graphics/Stars.avi

 

You need H.264 codec to see this animation.

 

[Przemyslaw.Gruchala]

Currently I am using database with just a few hundred thousands stars data from our closest area.

If you have access to raw data (preferably txt format) easily parsed data with millions or billions star data, please reply with link to them or write to me PM.

Data that are compressed, proprietary format, binary, not open, are useless.

[Civat]

Beautiful pictures!

[Przemyslaw.Gruchala]

I rendered star travel in direction of Sirius and beyond.

http://www.ultimate-theory.com/Graphics/Star%20Travel%201.avi

At 6 second since beginning we're passing Sirius, therefor it disappears.

 

Speed is approximately 44% of parsec per second of animation.

Edited March 19, 2013 by Przemyslaw.Gruchala

[Spart]

Just stunning. What language did you write this in?

[Przemyslaw.Gruchala]

Just stunning. What language did you write this in?

 

I write everything in C/C++.

In mine work I require speed even from the smallest tasks.

In the '80-'90 years I was writing stuff in assembler.

 

1 frame of animation without motion blur is rendering in 3 minutes on Core i7 930.

It has 16 passes of anti-aliasing and resolution 2048 x 2048 = 4.2 mln pixels * 16 = 67.1 mln internal code executions.

With motion blur it's going to ~35 minutes per frame..