This is my first Blender object which I publish here on blenderartists.org! It’s not a big project, to be exact it took me 12 hours right now and that only because I had to experiment with all the values and possibilities in texturing and compositing, but now I’m somehow proud that I got so far right now
It isn’t finished so I post in this forum. But now I need some advice what I could make better and what I should add/remove. Many stuff is done with Compositing, I will attach the .blend so you can take a look on it if you want to. Here’s the image:
This is version seven, if you want to see some steps to this version here are the other six versions and the blend file as links:
I would be very happy about every comment and criticism, don’t judge too hard please, I’m still a newbee as you might have seen Oh and by the way, english is not my native language, so please excuse the mistakes
the sun looks great
But maybe you should try to get rid of these odd snowflakes…
Stars are so far away that no cam could give any more resolution to them than a single pixel. The only reason we see them is, that they’re so bright.
But if you look at the sun, you wont see even a single other star. At best you’d see shadows of planets, being seen between sun and earth or something like that…
Ok, thanks for your comment First I removed the “snowflakes”, but now the picture looks a bit empty… And I added an other low-size texture to provide more small details of my sun. Ok, here’s version 8 now:
making the sun look interesting works for example by adding more activity to it (sun wind and stuff) or some obstacle that crashes into it (happened from time to time) or a spaceship battle or… something
Also, animating it or adding some planets to revolve around it…
Well Zarnik i try to find a average between realism and nice looking… The image you posted might be perfectly realistic, but if you’d ask someone to describe a sun, the first thing he or she would tell you is that a sun is bright, or yellow, or light, or any other words of that kind. So the color of the sun is wanted. And by the way, it’s no problem to change the color later on for a final picture, because only some view textures are actualy colorizing the sun. But anyway thanks for the tip!!!
Ok, now I’ve tried to animate my sun. Here’s what I got so far: Direct Link to the Video (online using an flv-Player)
If you would be super realistic. Since you view the sun from outside the planet…read this:
In popular culture, the Sun is yellow. But did you know that the color of the Sun is actually white? It’s only when light from the Sun passes through the Earth’s atmosphere that in changes in color, from white, to the yellow we see here on Earth. All stars have a color. From red dwarfs and red giants, to white and yellow stars to blue giants and supergiants. The color of a star comes from its temperature. As photons escape the interior of a star out into space, they have different amounts of energy. A star can be emitting infrared, red, blue and ultraviolet light all at the same time. They’re even emitting X-rays and gamma rays.
If a star is cool, less than 3,500 Kelvin, its color will be red. This is because there are more red photons being emitted than any other kind of visible light. If a star is very hot, above 10,000 Kelvin, its color will be blue. Once again, because there are more blue photons streaming from a star.
The temperature of the Sun is approximately 6,000 Kelvin. The Sun, and stars like our Sun appear white. This is because we’re seeing all the different color photons coming from the Sun at the same time. When you add all those colors up, you get pure white.
The white color inside this black box is approximately the color of the Sun.
True color of the Sun
So why does the Sun appear yellow here on Earth? The atmosphere of the Earth scatters sunlight, removing the shorter wavelength light – blue and violet. Once you reduce those colors from the spectrum of light coming from the Sun, it appears more yellow. But if you could fly up and see the Sun from space, the color of the Sun would be pure white. Here’s an article that talks about astronomers produce false color photographs of the Sun and other objects in space, and here’s a book review we did of the Sun’s Observer’s Guide.
Here’s a great article that explains the color of the Sun.
We have recorded an episode of Astronomy Cast just about the Sun called The Sun, Spots and All.
So if it’s not the star we see in the sky today, but a star somewhere else in the universe. It should either be blue white or red. If it should be yellow it should be viewed from the earth.
Animatinon looking good. A suggestion is to make the sun winds larger.
The sun looks pretty good. You could maybe try some Halo materials to get some cool effects and fill out the canvas better.
Also, since the sun is essentially a giant sunlight, you could use actual lamp objects inside the sun itself pointing outward and give the sun material a little bit of translucency. There are a lot of things you could do with lamps to make it look like its really shining and burning.
For the animation I think things should be moving more. You should animate the texture values if you know how -it’s pretty simple -it might create a cool effect because if you ever see the sun animated the first thing you notice is that the surface moves alot and really fast -like a trillion explosions going off all the time.
Finally, I agree that realistically stars wouldn’t be visible behind the sun if you’re going for totally accurate rendering but the image does look a little bland without stars around -maybe you could have some kind of falloff so stars only appear towards the edges of the frame as if they’re being obscured by the sun’s gravity (I’m no physicist lol)
And anyways a cool sphere with subsurface scattering enabled between the camera and the sun might give it a really interesting dimension (though you should keep in mind that if it’s Earth its not going to be completely pitch black on the facing side… and I believe most of the other planets have active geologic features that would show up such as lava/volcanoes, lightning, gas giant reactions etc… of course the sun is so bright it should make those features incredibly dim and obscured)
Ok, thanks for the advice and the long info! I wanted to try to make my sun have another color all the time, here’s what i got. Excuse the scraggly edges of my sun, it’s somehow because i used png now instead of jpg. I will correct this in the next versions.
You can get rid of the scraggily edges on PNG files by enabling Premul in the Render options.
The blue and red ones definitely look neat, mainly cause they’re different if anything.
Stars at different stages in their lives can actually be blue can’t they? That’d be a neat direction to take. The sun either in the distant past or distant future…
That looks neat, I think I like the red ones the best, looks very hot compared to the blue one. Once again, you should make the sun storms a lot bigger. Like in the image I posted. It will add much more to the animation. Believe me…
Very nice animation
As pointed out several times, the sunwinds should be more active to make it visually interesting
I rather like the differently coloured versions, especially “red” and “blue”
It’s not a big project, to be exact it took me 12 hours right now and that only because I had to experiment with all the values and possibilities in texturing and compositing, but now I’m somehow proud that I got so far right now 
Oh and by the way, english is not my native language, so please excuse the mistakes 
