Making the Animation Scene

In order to create the scene that I would use for my animation I first created a sphere primitive and scaled it up by a fairly large amount, next I used the Reverse tool in order to switch the way the faces were visible. After this I assigned a new Surface Shader material to it, this is because this material is not affected by lighting effects which would lead to a nice even looking texture for my skybox.

The next thing to do was to create the sun that would be present in my scene, for this I created a basic sphere and scaled it up to how I wanted it. Then I went into the Lambert materials attributes and selected the advanced options for Incandescence and selected a Fractal, I then adjusted the colour balance to a nice orange to use as the base of colour for my sun. In the fractals attributes I adjusted the Amplitude, Ratio and Frequency Ratio to create black patches on the sun to simulate hot spots. I then checked the animate box to turn it into a more 'living' texture, after I had done this I also had to create an Expression in the Time and Threshold attributes.

The Threshold Expression (fractal1.threshold = 0.1 + noise(time) / 10;) was used to randomly alter the Threshold attribute over time making it appear is if the surface was moving and changing in my animation. The Time Expression (fractal1.time = time / 120;) allowed the texture to be animated based to the timelines time by updating the threshold stat every frame, the number that it is being divided by is used to speed up or slow down the animation. The last step in creating my sun was to go and add a particle effect, I switched from the Modelling preset to the FX preset, from here I selected my sun and went to Effects > Fire, this added a basic fire particle effect to my sun but it was not emitting correctly as all the fire particles would act like a normal flame and travel upwards. In order to resolve his I simply had to navigate to the gravity field that was attached to the particle effect and delete the expression that caused the particles to float upwards, after this the effects was nicely fit around my sun, all that was left to do was reduce the maximum amount of particles and I was finished. One problem I have with the effect though is the longevity of the particles, they appear and then disappear too quickly making the sun look like it has been sped up, I have not yet found a way to solve this problem and I can only hope that I find a solution soon as then I would be very happy with the quality of my sun.

The last thing my scene needed some lighting, I added a point light to my sun in order to light up the scene and also added in some lens flare that I tinted to  a more orange/red colour, this light was not sufficient however, I tried increasing the intensity of the light but it made my models far to bright so instead I opted for a weak ambient light so you could see the side of the ships not facing the sun.

After my scene was complete I simply imported all my models into the scene ready to start work on the animation.