Solar Flare Animation

This is something I wanted to test out for quite some time. The main issue was trying to replicate the behavior of the plasma that is being ejected. Plasma in nature is neither smoke nor liquid so the traditional approach to it – ie. fluid simulation – wouldn’t work. Visually, it looks more like some kind of cloth… And then I figured, what if the basis of the animation would be a cloth sim. Then I would just need to render it out, right? Well, since we are talking about sun, plasma, and some generally hot stuff, I thought the answer could be using fire. So basically, I created a cloth sim to drive the emission of fire in Turbulence FD, set the decay to a reasonably high value, so that it looks like the flame follows – or rather creates – the arc I was looking for.