New Map Objects

[jfrazierjr]

Here is a picture of a star taken from the new scientist website here.

The corona is not quite a circular fade to the edges, you can see it's got more of a filligree effect. I had a quick ten minutes on photoshopt to try to recreate it, the result wasn't great but I reckon with a couple of hours work it's possible to get the knack of it.

I used GIMP.

I have 4 layers.

1st layer: (Gas) Color with a Gaussian Blur set at 40.
2nd layer: (Surface) Cloud/Plasma then desaturate it.
3rd layer: (Back Glow) Black to white Circular gradient with he layer set at 50% transparent.
4th layer: (Background) Fill Black with HSV Noise.

The Goal is to make them look reasonably nice and somewhat unique, while still being able to keep whole build time for the entire system down to about an hour apiece.

I was playing around the other day and made a sun. I created my base image with a orange->yellow gradient, blurred and then use a heavy noised displacement map a few times to simulate the flare effect. I did not do the noise overlay (which is something I like about yours David) or the coronal flare, but the overall effect was still rather nice for the 5 minutes I put into it.)