Looping realistic sun for animation sheet

Hi everyone.

I’m trying to create a looping sun animation ( space scene ) for a sprite sheet for a game i’m working on. I’ve taken inspiration from NASA’s footage of the sun and how the solar flares burst from the surface. So far I’ve managed to render a sun animation using boids and a textured plane mesh with alpha to create moving flames on the sun surface, then used distorted noise in the compositor with glare to make it look more natural, however I don’t know how to tween the animation to loop naturally on a sprite sheet of 64 frames.

I’d also like to add another composite on top to create the effect of bursting solar flare from the surface, however I am uncertain of how to approach the effect using particles or texture node trickery. The sprite sheet is for Unity.

Any advice will be much appreciated, as I am still learning how to work with particles and nodes. :spin:

If you aren’t limited with blender only, After Effects has effect called Fractal Noise and the best thing about it is that it can be easily turned into looping animated noise. Then you can use it as displacement map on image of sun etc.

just the underlying base texture for a star( our sun)
i have put together a bunch of full maps in simplecylindrical
– like this one –
http://t.imgbox.com/accJG8kX.jpg

from data from
http://solis.nso.edu/0/index.html

but for a bursting flare ?
those fallow the magnetic filed lines as the snap and brake

Unfortunately I do not have After Effects, however I did do a similar effect like this using blenders generated textures and distort filter in the node editor, then animated the scale and offset using the math nodes. From there I rendered it out as a sprite sheet. I’m trying to get the bursting solar flare effect, where the flames burst out, then “rains” back down to the surface. Here is the link to the NASA footage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFT7ATLQQx8

Thank you for the reply. I’ll try your suggestion. I’m assuming that you mean that a magnetic field should be used with the particles to pull it back down. I posted an example video in my to 3ookeeper’s post.