Star Corona Effect Animation Advice

Haru

heya everyone.

I have a commission for creating a few stars for a Unity videogame.
Obviously the texturing was something I managed no problem (I'm a generalist but I usually do texturing)

Real problems started when my commissioner told me to create a 2D animation for the Corona.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona

This will be placed on a plane behind the star to create the whole effect.

I tried to look around for some tutorials or something but I could not find anything useful.

Do you know any tutorial that can be of help?
Or do you guys know a good (and fast) way to do it?
Any hint or tip would be of extreme help since I'm not really good with animation.

I thought about doing it with a Maya particle and then modifying it on After Effect but I'm not sure.

A big thank to you all and sorry if I made some mistakes here and there, English is not my native language. ^^

Eric Chadwick

A couple ways to do this.

If you can write shaders (or have a node-based shader editor like Shader Forge) I'd suggest making a Saturn's-rings kind of mesh, as a billboard (always faces the camera). Tile a gradient around it as a mask, and use two noise textures scrolling in two directions to make the corona flares move.

Here's a similar example:



Or you could do it with a particle effect.
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/39688

Haru

First of all thank you A LOT for your anwser.

But I'm not really familiar with coding shaders.
My client wants just a flipbook texture he can use how he wants.
So the 3D particle in Unity is out of question too.

But in the meantime I managed to create a zero gravity fireball particle in Maya and render it as images.
Following a ImbueFX lesson I found online I'm trying to make the animation loopable and turn it into a flipbook texture.

It's actually turning out quite well so I'll try to follow this path and see how it ends.