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.

I also added a volumetric cloud to the grouping, colored it , scaled it. and adjusted its brightness to try to simulate solar flares and mass ejections.  I added a bulb light with a flare to  the surface to simulate the white-hot flare effect that coronal mass ejections give when viewed head-on.

I've been meaning to model a star also with Carrara after reading a tutorial a couple issues back in 3D World Mag.  Great job on yours, by the way.

I have that SOHO picture :). You are doing a really good job duplicating the look of it, the flares look almost just like the picture.
The only thing I can see that is different is that the yellow/orange/red color variations of the soho image aren't dots; they are some kind of turbulence noise.

Really cool image!!

Thanks for the feedback guys. I agree with Dvlenk6 about the basic star material. I plan to do more fine-tuning with it and see if I can get closer to the SOHO picture by using some of DCG's EnhanceC noise functions to mix the glow channel. I was just gratified to see how good of an image I could get using Carrara's "out-of-the-box" abilities in a mere 15 minutes. Your comments have me thinking that I'm on the right track. Now I'm thinking of doing a Nova animation. Fun stuff. :-)

What a great looking star!  Congratulations.

Thanks UVDan!