Lava

Lava materials turn any surface into a slowly churning molten skin. Put one on a sphere and you get a star or a lava planet; put it on a logo, a 3D letter or an imported model and the shape looks cast from magma. The surface never stops moving: hot cells roll and curl into each other, bright cracks open between them, darker patches drift across, and the edge of the shape glows against the background.

How it works

Every lava variant is the same molten surface with different settings. The pattern is built in 3D around the object rather than painted on as a flat image, so it wraps a shape without seams. A temperature value is worked out at every point from three ingredients: a flowing noise that is warped twice, so the plasma smears and curls instead of sliding in one direction; a network of thin bright filaments between the convection cells; and rare dark spots with a dimmer ring around them, like sunspots. That temperature is then mapped onto a five-step color ramp, from the coolest crust color to the hottest white.

Two things go beyond color. The surface itself boils: the shape is pushed in and out along its surface by a slow noise, so the silhouette bulges gently. And a rim glow is added where the surface turns away from the camera, which is what makes a lava sphere read as a hot ball rather than a flat disc.

The variants

• Bright and solar: Sun Lava is the default orange star surface; Blue Giant is the same idea in cobalt and white, faster and brighter.
• Dark and cooled: Obsidian Crust is mostly black rock with orange veins; Dying Ember is dim charred coal that only glows where it cracks.
• Aggressive: Hellfire is blood-red with the heaviest boil; Plasma Storm is the fastest and most chaotic, in magenta.
• Off-color: Toxic Slime is radioactive green; Cryo Magma is slow violet with big lazy cells.

How to choose

Start from the mood, then tune. For a sun, a star or a hero planet, pick one of the bright variants and raise Brightness and Rim Intensity. For a volcanic rock, a cooling boulder or a threatening object that should stay readable, pick a dark variant: high Crack Intensity on dark colors gives glowing fissures on black. For sci-fi energy, Plasma Storm or Toxic Slime.

The settings that change the picture most are Speed (how fast everything churns), Cell Scale (bigger numbers give more, smaller cells), Warp Strength (how much the flow curls), Crack Intensity, Spot Intensity, Rim Intensity, Boil Amplitude (how far the surface bulges) and Brightness. The five ramp colors and Rim Color set the palette.

A lava sphere pairs naturally with a glowing halo around it: put a corona material on a slightly larger sphere and the star is complete. Add bloom in post-processing and the hottest colors spill light around the object.