Looking for recommendations to Create a physically accurate sun

[Drosaca]

Hi, I' m trying to create the sun in space (as a light emitting object if it's feasible) with a light source as physically accurate as possible.

I was wondering if someone has any recommendations on which kind of light sources I shoud use (AreaLight or PhysicalSpotLight) and which values I should tweak to get the best result.

thanks,

[gkjohnson]

Your best bet for getting some kind of realistic sun and sky effect is probably to use an environment map for lighting.

[Drosaca]

My goal is to simulate sunlight hitting a distant object from various angles in space and render an image that closely resembles what a real camera would capture when pointing at the dark night sky.

Initially, I was considering creating the sun either as an object that emits light or as an invisible light source to simplify its positioning relative to the object . Do you think this path tracer can handle such a simulation?
Additionally, do you still believe that using a normal map would be the better approach here?
If this simulation doesn’t face any known limitations, I would greatly appreciate any suggestions on the types of objects or parameters that would help achieve the most realistic results.

[Drosaca]

I Tried with a physical spotlight and a sphere with emissivity set at 1 the spotlight is in the center of the sphere and all of this is positioned at 1 astronomical unit (in meters) with the real lumen value
which gives this

it's too bright even to see the colors
if I reduce the brigness by 10^4 it's better but not physically accurate

[gkjohnson]

Sorry for the delay in response - generally I would still recommend something like an environment map that has data encoded in a known unit for this use case. Punctual lights (like directional lights, spot lights, point lights) are difficult to model and not realistic representations of light sources, though at far ranges the sun is often modeled as a directional light.

Additionally, do you still believe that using a normal map would be the better approach here?

I don't think a normal map would help with lighting here. Do you mean an environment map?

render an image that closely resembles what a real camera would capture
...
all of this is positioned at 1 astronomical unit (in meters) with the real lumen value which gives this

There's a lot that's involved in modeling what a real camera would capture, I think, including lens distortion, etc, which isn't directly supported in the project. But I believe the primary piece that's missing here in terms of displayed light intensity would be tone mapping and color mapping - which will map the light intensities captured by the virtual (or real) sensor to a displayable color range.

You should be able to adjust both those fields on the WebGLRenderer (see the .colorMapping and .toneMapping settings).