Supergiant Stars shape

[Fuszion117]

i'm just wondering: sometimes giant stars CAN get strange shapes when they're about to go supernova, but do they HAVE to be shaped like asteroids? why not just make them more spherical? (well, not TOO spherical, if you know what i mean.) like, make them at least halfway or 2/3 smoother. you don't HAVE to if you want, just saying...

[HarbingerDawn]

Extremely large stars have very uneven shapes caused by giant convection cells, due to the low "surface" gravity of such giant stars. The issue in SE is not the shape but the opacity; in reality, the outer layers of supergiant stars are very diffuse and "puffy", so they don't have a sharp "surface" like more compact stars appear to. The outer layers of these stars are less dense than the region of Earth's atmosphere that the International Space Station orbits in.

Last year I made a crude imitation of a red giant (not a supergiant) in SE using an accretion disk. It's not terribly accurate, but it shows how important volumetrics are to making it look more natural:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyT-65Nhw7k
In the future we plan to use volumetric rendering for giant stars, like with accretion disks or nebulae.

[HarbingerDawn]

Huh, I went looking around in SE, and it seems like supergiant surfaces are generated differently than they used to be? Definitely something to fix.