Greetings brief mortals! I've been experimenting with a binary star system for a possible entry into the old stuff challenge. This is as far as I've got: two suns. The scene, I hope, shall be of a dry and cracking landscape of an old and dying world. Maybe some ruins (possibly Carin from the Narnia series?)

Anyway, these two suns I'm wondering about and seek your constructive advice. First of all, I'm trying to get that firey look and not sure if the left sun with the white specks looks real-ish or the right sun without the white specks looks the more real-ish. I don't like that dark shadow on the surface of the one on the right, but i think that's probably due to the spheres not being centered.

What ya'll think?

binary star systems in many more cases than not are made of two different stars: a blue dwarf and a red giant, about to go super nova -  which spells death to the planets nearby fer sure

just my 10 cents

There are photos, Illustrations and discriptions of dying suns on the web... for me to tell you how to make your binary system look like would be speculation...   I've seen them in photos but as fuzzy bright lights...     good topic to pick BTW...

And they are usually not so close as I have depicted here, or their own gravity will either rip each other apart (and there should be some sharing of solar material between them) and/or the one with the lesser mass will become very distorted.

For fun I started with a black hole next to the star but that would've led to postwork to draw gas and sun particles being pulled into the black hole in the spiral pattern and I'm not good enough with the mouse to do such a drawing, so the next option was a binary system.

The best photos I find are taken by some solar observatory which shows the sun like the one on the left, but the number of white specks are much less.

Here's a closeup to the sun on the left.  Just multiple layers of fire until this appears.

nice star we got...  you got to give it a red yellowish color to make it look dying....

This is a quick and dirty render showing the aura effect you can make by using volume radials in back of an infinite plane assigned to a glass material and rotated 90 degrees. The radial on the left is grouped with a larger sphere assigned with a fire mat, but with the right material and a little experimenting you can get sun-spots and flare-like effects. I wish I could find the pic I did of a binary system. I even had an acretion disk going where the two stars were swapping solar material. Good luck. Dan

Ilike the aura you gave them....     It would be nice to have them share, as you said, materials.....

@ Danamo: Interesting technique there for the aura effect. I would like to study this a bit more. Could I trouble you to show a wireframe?

Sure DaM, I'd be happy to. I present this as an idea you can bounce around. I recommend trying various experiments to tailor the effect to your own tastes. HTH, Dan

Here's the sample settings I used for the yellow "star". Yup, I'm still using Bryce 5.01, so your settings may be different.

@ Danamo: This is pretty interesting what you've done. I'm going to try it out. I also use Bryce 5 on my laptop (I am the type that [CTRL] + [TAB] to full screen often). Those suns were made in B5. I use 6.1 but only after I finish laying out the scene (and don't need to toggle to full screen any more.) Thanks!

cool...yeah..any planet in a binary star system is going to go through extremes of temperature, due to the loopy orbits (ok, one scenario, but you know what I mean..;)

I'd like to share one other thing that I've found concerning the "aura" effect; it also works very well with Bryce's sun! This example uses the Sky preset "Afternoon Sun". I turned off clouds, though it works very well with clouds as well, and used the "Glass Bubble" preset for the infinite plain. Just more grist for the mill. If you use some of the sunset presets you can make an absolutely Hellish-looking sun in the background. This should even satisfy His NibsTheBryster because this is all done using only Bryce,lol.

Speaking of binary stars, you might get a kick out of reading this article. :)

http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2286

the textures are awesome, d_a_m :)

Okay folks, I think I'm done with this. What ya'll think?

For the glare, I'm using the Danamo technique posted above. I tried other ways but this gave the best result. Other methods, such as using a flat sphere, could be used for a pretty nice nova animation.

I think it looks great D_a_M!  Your textures and solar flares were great from the get-go.
A nova animation would be very kewl!

i want to have your babies!!

drac
(i don't say that to everyone, you know..)

Ack!  LOL!   :-D

Anyway, I'm thinking of two things with this... one is a calendar project I'm doing with data of all the planets and the new proto-planet things way out there next to the Oort cloud. Secondly, I'm thinking of using this somehow as a background to one of the projects I'm submitting to the Old Stuff challenge. Afterall, the Sun is about 4.5 billion years old.

Call me when you've gone beyond the Coal Sack.

great tip

These are some pretty cool ideas. I definently gonna try it.