Aldebaran is a giant orange star in the constellation of Taurus. Pioneer 10 is on a trajectory in the general direction of this star, so it earned a place in my film. I already had one shot of a star in the film, so I needed to make this one particularly stand out.

I decided to create another close up shot, however this time using a particle system to generate huge solar flares across the surface, with Pioneer racing around the star (at a not so safe distance). Despite the clear scientific inaccuracies, I wanted something dramatic, and nothing is quite as dramatic as fireballs exploding from a gigantic orange star.

The particle simulations were done with X-Particles, you can see my set up below:

I set up multiple emissions, one major flare arcing away from the surface, and a few other more subtle ones inside the Star. Using particle groups, I was able to separate each flare and create varied dynamics for each one.

Below, you can see the procedural shader I set up - this consisted of various noise shaders animated in varied ways to get an interesting pattern across the Star's surface. I rendered this as a greyscale image and colourised it in After Effects. Each noise layer from the shader was rendered out individually, as well as a layer which was painted in bodypaint to mask areas where the particle flow was emitted from the Star.

The Pioneer model was also rendered out, and then composited in After Effects. You can see my After Effects scene file below:

Quite a difference right? As you can see I used many adjustment layers, which I can cover more extensively if there is any interest, but they mostly consist of various glow effects, lots of masking, blurs, lots of colour correction and finally distortions.

And, as always, the animated version will be available for viewing once the film is released, for now, here is a screenshot of the composited shot!