Images and Movies

• I played around with an implementation of Metropolis Light Transport in Sunrise. The image is the sidebar is a frame from 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.
• Greg Novak and I made a high-quality rendering of the prograde-retrograde Sbc major merger that we had the partially completed movie of before, and entered this into the 2008 NSF Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge. 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:

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

• Some images from the high-resolution version of our Sbc-Sbc galaxy merger(10x the normal number of particles and Monte-Carlo rays) described in Cox et al. (2005):
  
• Movies of galaxy mergers. These were done with an older version of Sunrise, so there are obvious grid artefacts visible from some angles: G3G3 (with rotation), G3G3 (all cameras sequentially), Sbc-Sbc merger.
• New movie of the G3G3 merger, sitting on a particle that would be in the solar neighborhood if this was the Milky Way, looking at the other galaxy. The 4 frames are: top left, color composite including dust; top right, color composite without dust; lower left, mass density of gas (red) and stars (green); and lower right, infrared dust emission: crash movie.
• High-quality movie of a high-resolution prograde-retrograde Sbc major merger run on the Columbia machine. The time resolution is 2Myr per frame which gives it a much more fluid appearance than the other movies, and the high resolution shows a lot of detail. The simulation was so expensive it's only been run up until right after the final merger, the movie shows first a face-on view and then an edge-on view. The file is a 77 MB H.264-encoded movie playable with QuickTime 7, and for some reason it has a tendency to stutter on Windows machines, even very powerful ones. I guess that's Apple for you... ;-)