This is a sun. Made in Houdini. Every pixel of it was generated procedurally — the chunky orange shards (a fluid simulation, voxelised and posterised), the warm yellow core, the soft halo bleeding into the black, the scattered stars in the background. None of it was painted.
That distinction matters because painting is fast and procedural is not. A skilled artist with Photoshop could produce something like this in twenty minutes. The Houdini network took considerably longer.
But the network is parameterised. Change one slider, the sun is bigger. Change another, it’s blue. Animate the chunk-density and you get an explosion. The trade is build-time complexity for runtime flexibility — and once the network exists, the time cost is amortised across every variation you’ll ever need.
It’s also more fun, in the way that building a thing that builds things is more fun than building the thing.