Filament Based Plasma

Simulate EUV footage of the sun generated by simply inputing a randomly
generated magnetic surface flux texture into our pipeline.

Abstract

Simulation of stellar atmospheres, such as that of our own sun, is a common task in CGI for scientific visualization, movies and games. A fibrous volumetric texture is a visually dominant feature of the solar corona---the plasma that extends from the solar surface into space. These coronal fibers can be modeled as magnetic filaments whose shape is governed by the magnetohydrostatic equation. The magnetic filaments provide a Lagrangian curve representation and their initial configuration can be prescribed by an artist or generated from magnetic flux given as a scalar texture on the sun's surface. Subsequently the shape of the filaments is determined based on a variational formulation. The output is a visual rendering of the whole sun. We demonstrate the fidelity of our method by comparing the resulting renderings with actual images of our sun's corona.

Submission Video

A smooth magnetic field (left) is approximated by a collection of magnetic filaments (middle), which are discretized by a set of discrete curves with thicknesses.

Quick Summary

• Addresses Magnetoghydrostatic equations through a Lagrangian technique
• Establish plasma filament model
• Establish filament glow model
• Procedurally generate solar-like images
• Reproduce solar loop structures

Talk

Pairwise comparisons of our output (left) with footage by NASA (right)
in both, EUV (top row) and X-Ray (bottom row) emissions.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the DFG Collaborative Research Center TRR 109 "Discretization in Geometry and Dynamics," the Caltech Center for Information Science and Technology, and the Einstein Foundation Berlin. Additional support was provided by SideFX software. We thank the reviewers for their helpful input.

Bibtex

@article{padilla2022filament,
  author = {Marcel Padilla and Oliver Gross and
  Felix Kn\"{o}ppel and Albert Chern and Ulrich Pinkall and Peter Schr\"{o}der},
  title = {Filament Based Plasma},
  journal = {ACM Transaction on Graphics (TOG)},
  year = {2022},
  month = {07},
  volume = {41},
  number = {4},
  articleno = {153},
  doi = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3528223.3530102},
  publisher = {ACM},
  address = {New York, NY, USA}
}

Note

This work was wildly expanded and covered in more detail in my PhD dissertation.