Haha, yea it's generally inadvisable to look directly into the sun IRL, so let's keep it digital :p I never got into those software. I had a friend that was really into Vue, but I never liked the results. Since then I've seen some stunning stuff from Vue, but still haven't tried it myself.

I'm mostly referring to general 3D software like Maya. Before I was using Maya with either Mental Ray or Renderman, and yea, like I said of course it's been possible, but back then it took hours to render a sphere in HD with a fog volume.