This is the starting image of a star animation that I am working on. I saw a NASA Soho deep UV image of the sun and decided to see how close I could come to simulating it in Carrara5. Within 15 minutes I had a decent simulacrum whipped into shape.      I began by inserting a sphere primitive to which I assigned a shader with a color gradient in the glow channel mixed by a fractal noise. I duplicated the sphere, enlarged it a bit and assigned a red aura effect to that. I added and scaled a fire object which I added to a surface replicator assigned to the original sphere. I wasn't able to get as fine a control with a blur object as I liked so I added a very slight gaussian blur to the "star" in PS.     I am going to do a separate particle animation QT of a  recirculating plasma loop which I will assign to a few billboards arranged arround the circumference of the star for the final animation. I love Carrara more each time I open it. Comments, observations and suggestions are more than welcome.