Total Eclipse of the Blender

Space. The Final Frontier. No, scratch that, Star Trek is too clinical and pristine. For all the inspiration it has given inventors the world over, it does not have the grittiness or real-life-ness to make it in any way believable as a possible future. Need something more like Firefly.

Blender provides an automatic star background, so that part was easy. And the planet is just a simple sphere with bit of a texture on it to look like it has land and sea. The fun part is the star. It has the ability to show a set of vertices as halos, spots of light. And each spot can have lots of additional features, such as flares, rings surrounding the spot, lines emanating from it, star shapes around it, and several other fancier things. Plus of course varying the size and brightness of the spot itself. In combination it gives a large space of different effects, from ghostly wisps of light through sun sized nuclear burn-outs like this one. Which look like its about to engulf this planet which is getting way too close. That water won't be there for much longer.

Once I learn how to do animation, I am going to see if I can get this sun spinning, and see whether I can actually make it look active and dynamic, and not just a static model. Twenty more chapters to get through before we get to animation, so don't hold your breath just yet. Not that you had any attention of doing so anyway.