Difficulty:

I had posted a completed sun on Marvin X's Better Planet Tutorial a while back which I was very proud of. After many weeks of trying- tweaking here, tweaking there, trying to simplify the whole thing I came up with something I think I actually improved upon the original:

To this one, which we will create today:

1. Start with a big square canvas -1500x1500. Tip–too small or too big and we lose some detail.
2. Fill with black. Tip-leave the eye visible at all times
3. New canvas, filled with a dark yellow color. Name it 'color'. Click the eye off to turn invisible. Tip-I used f6ae03.
4. Duplicate 'color', named 'texture' – active layer
5. Filters>Artistic>Gimpressionist
5a. Presets tab: Furry
5b. Paper tab: n/a
5c. Brush tab: Dribble
5d. Orientation tab: Flowing
5e. Size tab: Flowing
5f. Placement tab: Randomly
5g. Color tab: Average under brush
5h. General tab: Solid – Paint edges. Drop shadow.
Now we should have what looks like a really tacky shag rug carpet:

6. Grab a big fuzzy brush. Use a darker yellow-use the 'value' slider in the color dialogue; don't use black due to the blending modes. Stick some random splotches wherever-these are your sunspots. Don't make them too big or too many:

7. Filters>Map>Map Object
7a. Options tab: Map to sphere; Transparent Background; The rest are defaults.
7b. Light tab: No light
7c. Material tab: n/a
7d. You can play with the X and Y Rotation to get your sunspots where you want them:

8. Duplicate your texture twice, name one 'blur', the other 'distress'. put 'blur' directly below your 'texture' layer. Put 'distress' below that -then turn 'distress' invisible, keep 'blur' active:

9a. Filters>Blur>Gaussian blur; Blur by 8 pixels:

9. Duplicate blur layer – named 'glow'. Move 'glow' layer below 'texture' 'blur' and 'distress':

9a. Filters>Blur>Gaussian Blur
9b. Blur by 40 pixels
9c. Filters>Blur>Motion blur; Set to Zoom:
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10. Make texture layer active layer. Layer>Transparency>Alpha to Selection.
11. Select>Grow. Grow by 8 pixels.
12. New layer. Named 'distress2' Script-Fu>Selection>Distress Selection. Keep the defaults.
12a. Fill with the same yellow we used in step 3:
13. Deselect all. Tip-Ctrl-Shift-A.
15. Gaussian blur by 5 pixels:

16. Move 'distress2' below 'distress' and merge down 'distress' with 'distress2' into one layer:

Blending mode on 'texture' is set to Screen. Blending mode on 'blur' is Overlay. Blending mode on 'distress2' is set to Dodge. All other layers are set to Normal.
17. Merge down from the bottom up. If you merge down from the top down you will lose all the blending effects.
Tip- to keep the blending effects but still keep our completed sun transparent so we can put it into a starscape: On 'distress2' layer, Alpha to Selection, New layer, fill selection with black; put this at the bottom of the stack above the background layer in normal mode.
18. And we have our completed sun:


And now for part 2 – The large prominences:
1. Turn off the eye on all completed layers except for the black background layer.
2. The original background layer is active-it is important to create our flame on the original background layer, the flame looks best on a layer without an alpha channel. I have tried many, many times to get the flame to look good when created on a layer with an alpha channel and it just does not look right.
2a. Filters>Render>Nature>Flame.
4. Make sure Colormap is set to our yellow 'color' layer -you didn't delete it did you?
5. Hit the edit button and play with the displays -set the variation to sphere and start looking for some big looping circles. Use the Zoom in the camera tab to get up close and personal with the detail-remember we will be putting our completed sun on top of the flame so keep that in mind when deciding on your flame.
6. Duplicate background copy three times so we have a total of four copies including the background.
6a. Blur the bottom layer. Filters>Blur>Gaussian Blur. Blur by 8.
7. The blending modes for the flame copies will be the oppisite of the sun: Top one will be Dodge. Second one will be Overlay. Third one will be Screen. Bottom one will be Normal.
8. Merge down from the bottom up.
9. On the completely merged flame layers-
9a. Layers>Colors>Brightness/Contrast Drag the contrast up:

10. Delete the solid yellow layer.
11. And we have our completed sun:

Cut out the black background with your favorite tool -I recommend 'select regions by color'. And put your completed sun into your favorite solar system.

Since this is my first tutorial please let me know if I need to make any clarifications.
Thanks to Marvin X and Kelxz for inspiration.
Please use this tutorial, abuse it, Just mention me somewhere.

nice. (srry I'm no gud at constructive criticism)

looks fantastic! NASA may turn to you for pictures of teh sun.... :w:

is this written so bad no one wants to give it a try??

75 hits and only 2 comments? :m: :a: :c:

Nice illustrated tutorial.

thanks for sharing FunkyFloyd.

regards

Woohoo! I've been looking for a sun tutorial. :h:

well, nice effect

but i don't want to be mean or anything, its just it dosent seem very 3d to me, just some constuctive crit. maybe a subtle drop shadow or highlight?

a drop shadow on what? the universe?

a highlight from what light source? its the sun!

keep in mind all screenies were shrunk to keep the bandwidth-sucking down.
if you walk through the tut and create your own finished product hopefully you will get a better effect that what is shown.

I've been waiting for this, I'll post my result when I'm finshed.

ROFL!!!! This is a great tut! I really like the finished product. I will try this and post results.
:w:

Just downloaded this and Marvin X's Better Planet Tutorial on dialup...25 mins!

Both tutorials seem very clearly written but I'm a beginner with a vast potential to screw it up so we'll see.

How come no results posted?

Here's mine...
Didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped it would though.

It's a good tutorial but I don't think it's do-able for spacescape images because:
-It's a huge picture of the sun, which isn't the most artistically interesting thing when representing the universe, most people choose things like planets and nebulah for their space pics.
-If you put that sun in the picture, there'd be really no room for anything else and it'd be just silly if we could see any planets from the sun because that would mean they'd be close enough to get pulled into the sun. So most people usually make their suns as seen from a planet, making it smaller and without great detail.
- finally, this one's more like nit picking, if the sun really did give off those kinds of solar flares, there'd be some pretty funky magnetic consequences not to mention it would completely fry all the electronics on the lit side of the Earth.

Just my two cents,
Leinad

But it's excellent if the star is your focal point, and the planets are details, instead of the standard other way round.

on the contrary, i think it would make a great focal point. you could do a whole solar system, orbital planes and all :w:

-shrink to fit

last time i checked you cant have a planet without a sun, maybe i and nasa are wrong on that though.

thats pretty amazing considering i created it on a computer and not in an actual universe, if any one sees their electronics frying after doing the tut let me know

Last time I checked you could never see a detailed planet from the sun (because if you could see Earth from our sun, things would get pretty hot over here). I never said there shouldn't be a sun (in fact some solar systems have two suns). And I'd like to draw your attention to a little something called proportion and those sun flares are way out of proportion, making your sun unrealistic.

But I don't see why I'm actually reposting all this because it's rather blantant you don't want this tut criticised.

i see, so you are unwilling to work through the tut, learn from it, and create something purely yours then?

i figured this out by several other tutorials on this site, not a single one had to do with the sun.
this is my creation. maybe you could learn to create something from the techniques within which is the whole point of contributing to this site.

look at the possibilities, not the negativities

I've been working on GIMP for 6 years. So I don't see anything 'new' I could get out of this tutorial. And where learning comes in, for future reference (having written myself several tutorials on several different things including 3D creation for gaming) it's best to learn from what the people have to say even if you might not particularly like what they have to say instead of back talking cheekily when someone tries to help advance your work.