Textures, displacements and volumes for the sun done procedurally in Blender 3.0 and rendered out using Cycles X. Gotta say, super impressed with how much faster Cycles X was compared to 2.93 - this scene took just under one minute per frame to render out - in 2.93 vanilla Cycles, it was over thirty minutes per frame!
This was a tricky one – not going to lie. A lot of trial and error to get that iconic close up sun look – and even then, I still think it could use some more work… Stars in general are quite tricky to get right... The surface texture of the sun was a combination of a noise and vornoi texture, mixed in with an emission shader and keyframed for movement.
I tried out different ways to do the solar flares – first with an emitter particle system + forcefields and a ton of motion blur – but that ended up looking too grainy and didn’t give those clean arcs. Next, I tried literally using a hair particle system and grooming the strands to arc down – but it was fiddly and hard to art direct (looked really good though, might have to spend more time playing with that method). Finally, I settled on using a hair particle system and a series of volumetric spheres, masked out with an emission gradient volumetric texture. This way also made it easier to animate using a noise texture.
Doing this all procedurally allowed for rapid iteration to get to the kind of look that I wanted – and gave me a lot of flexibility to tweak and change elements of the scene as I went without worrying too much about breaking the model.
