/3/ - 3DCG

>>976955
Lookin good anon. The dancin rat makes it all the better. Good work! Now I'll let you move on to another project :^)
>turns out starting the particle animation 24 frames earlier just wasn't enough
I usually take the lifetime of my particles, and start them about 1.5x-2x the length of them before. So if you have a lifetime of 30 frames, set the start point for the particles 45 frames before the start of your animation, and adjust the count a little bit. Gives them a chance to die out and should get rid of weird particle anim "starting" artifacts.
>I was running into an issue...
Did you bake your particle sim? If you didn't that might have been the issue.
>trying to make Cycles calculate with the added campfire lightsource and the particles being rendered as solid objects,
I don't think it should have shit the bed too hard, unless you're rendering on a potato. For what it's worth, Cycles operates slower than Eevee because it's path tracing.

>>976973
Add a material to an object, change the color.

>>976982
I think what makes the original work is the contrast. There's so much of it that the forms except for the rim lighting are pretty much black. The low density of the background stars is also an important thing that doesn't reveal the shapes of things until the light is shone on them. I also think that the falloff of your sun is a bit too much, since the one in the video is kind of a crisp disk with only the very edge of it being feathered. Blowing out the bloom a bit more should help too. There's also some nice color shift n the bloom like chromatic abberation that might be nice to add after a glare node.
Pic related is just 2 spheres (and a sun lamp), one emissive, one with a principled shader. I'm just showing it from the viewport, but you'd probably just plug in the emissive or a cryptomatte to isolate just the sun. There's also a nifty sunbeam node that you might want to take a look at. It's a pain to animate though.