Making a Space scene and I need a little help

[suture]

check out the 'Build Better Space' tut re: http://www.ap3d.com/betterspace/betterspace-tut-00.htm

[ASCIISkull]

First of all, you can use a procedural texture to vary the brightness of the stars. a bloom filter of some sort on the brighter ones.

You could use sprite HVs or Pointclone to give some of the stars more interesting looks. Maybe even throw some luxigons in there.

[teacher3d]

One thing to remember with starfields that you need a LOT of stars. One thing a lot of users don't do is generate enough, yet looking at professional space animation work, you'll often see a ridiculously HUGE amout of stars.

One thing you can do to boost the amount of stars in the star field would be to add some 'procedural' stars t pad out the star field in the distance - The problem of course with procedural stars is you won't get the cool streakiness you do with particle-blur and one-poly star fields. (though some motion blur can help)

Its pretty easy - Just Go to scene -> Backdrop, add a textured Environment and set up a 'crust' procedural. Just set the scale of the crust to 20mm, 20mm, 20mm and the coverage to 0.1 - Usually that is a fast way to quickly generate an infinite ball of 'stars' (Use VIPER to quickly tweek and check to get the look you're after)

Another good way to generate a tonne of stars is to clone the starfield point cloud a few times and scale each of them larger, rotate them randomly to the others to jumble and create a denser star field.

[Munkufust]

You guys are too awesome. Thanks a ton for the help.

Teacher3d, I tried the backdrop way of making the stars. When I render the single frame it looks awesome, but when I animate the camera it doesn't seem to move. I apologise for being such a newbie. Do the stars not move with that method? Thanks again.

- Jason

[PaulyBarnes]

An image set as a backdrop is going to stay static no matter where you move the camera.

Put it on a Single Poly plane if you want them to move...But the best option honestly for animation is the globe tutorial above.

[Dreamwave]

For realistic space scenes, don't forget to NOT-model the gravity!

[SimianLogic]

Whether or not you need a ton of stars depends on what results you are going for. If you are doing something cartoony, then I would agree and go nuts with the stars. If you want something a little more realistic, realize that most stars are invisible to cameras unless you take really long exposures. Even in feature films you sometimes see a cut from a camera shot with a real looking sky to an effects shot with a billion stars--it can be very noticeable.

[Munkufust]

Thanks again for the help guys. I went through that better space tutorial. They still seem to look just like little white pixels for some reason. Also when I animate the camer moving through the sphere it looks like theres a ton at first then when it progresses down the timeline they get fewer and fewer. Does anyone know why this might be happening? Thanks again.

- Jason

[Ramon]

Jason, to help get rid of this tininess problem, you could use hypervoxels set to surface and vary the sizes. You'll have to do some fiddleling around with it to get the look your after.
Also, you may have an envelope on you texture setting that is causing the stars to fade out over time. I would check that to make sure.

[SirReality]

You could be losing stars because as you move through the point cloud there ends up being less and less points in front of the camera and more behind it.

Another way to beef up the size of your single-point polygons would be to use Lightwave's edge settings. I would suggest turning edges on for your starfield object, probably setting the size to large [3 px?] and activating the option which shrinks the edges with distance that way they will be smaller when they are further away. If you aren't familiar with edges you can access them by selecting your object, calling up its properties, and then selecting the edges tab.

I like to use the crust procedural for creating starfield backdrops. I do it with texture environment and usually throw a layer of turbulance as an alpha over the crust. This helps vary the appearent size and brightness of the stars. Crust I usually scale to 100 mm in all dimensions, turbulance usually sits around 1m. You might be able to achieve an animated "moving through stars" effect by animating the position channels of all of the layers of your texture environment. I've also toyed with a layer as a nebula on top of the turbulance. I figured out my settings for this by examining the settings of the Eki's Skygen example scenes that came with LW 7.

And your best possible effect would probably come from some magical combination of all of the above suggestions and a lot of tweaking.

Hope this helped you out.

[Munkufust]

Thanks again guys! I really appreciate the help. I'll get this eventually! Hah.

SirReality, I think I kind of understand what you are saying. But is there anyway we could talk on e-mail or aol messanger or something like that? I just have a few questions that would be easier to ask that way. I keep getting a stinking server is full message on here. Driving me nuts. Alright thanks man.

- Jason

[Munkufust]

hey guys, thanks again for all the help. I am really close to getting this. I used the betterspace tutorial and it looks good but they still tend to have a ton at first then drop off as the camera passes through. Also I havnt found a good way to make them glow a bit more to appear larger. Does anyone have a good example file they could maybe show me? Thanks guys.

- Jason

[Rei Ayanami]

get LW 8, it has a starfield generator!!

</stupid plug>

[Munkufust]

aw if only :( lol

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