Realistic Night Sky??

[Boolieman]

Why don't you try putting it on the inside of a huge spere and then if it has an athzmus point it looks just like the real thing

[the3DBEAST]

ok....but what is a athzmus point ? hehe, i have no idea. sorry :)

[Boolieman]

an asmuzus point is the point absoulutly directly above you
is that good enough of a defenition

[the3DBEAST]

yup, perfect :) thanx! i guess my sky just looks huge, maybe i just need to make my sphere bigger, i will try that :)

[klinker]

what`s your problem? your picture looks nice. ok the clouds are a little bit 2 dimensional. but the moon and the stars are really pretty. perhaps you can make it a little bit darker...

daniel

[thesaint]

quite different from what you have, but it just so happens i made this up over the weekend (PRMan from Maya) to test the creation of low density IBI images (works well by the way).

The compression and small file allocation here just about killed it a thousand times over. Right now it is in 16 bit targa in D1 res, but i also have a floating point (IBI) version of the same size.

Anyway, if it helps you i would be delighted to send along, if not here are some things that helped me.


I looked at a bunch of photo's on NASA's web site, mostly so i knew what colors to use and what kind effect such huge depths would have so i could fake it.
The i used some procudeures in PRMan and some MEL to get the dispersal of particles just right. The moon was a sphere that was flatened during render to give that characteristic flat look and the image map applied to it was created by stiching a bunch of photo's together to create what turned out to be a 6k full plate of the surface (much more than i needed, but cest la vie).

I would add additional clouds and other atmospherics in a new composite layer frankly, but i didn't need them for my purpose so i didn't create them.
Clouds would be simply particles or shaded blobby surfaces that could be rendered RGBA and then composited and color corrected in Shake or AE or whatever.

To use this as a space ship of interplanetary sequence i would then apply this to smal section of polys taken from the side of a sphere to get that 'bent in aspect' look. I would then 'film' using this as a backdrop.

Sorry for the long explanation of a simple process. PM me if you want that image and let me know what format and if it helps i also have a PSD version in layers.

[JasonA]

If it were me, I'd simply make a map of a starfield with the moon on it and apply it to the inside of a sphere. Chances are the reason yours ended up looking like crap was cause it wasn't set up right. Your pic looks nice.

make the map size some power of 2 and with a 2:1 aspect ratio (like 1024x512 or whatever). And put your visible elements (moon,fog etc) in the upper half of the map. Don't simply resize the map, you don't want your stuff distorted. Add more stuff to either side of it, basically changing the canvas size to 2:1. This could be your "night sky" map.

then load a up scene and create a nurbs sphere and scale it up very big (so it encompasses everything in the scene). Go into the attribute editor and change its render globals to not cast or recieve shadows. Apply a lambert shader to it, and crank up the ambient color slider to maximum. open up the Color map slot, and put and Env Sphere texture in it, and use the map file you made above.

Go back to your scene and try rendering from a camera. You should end up with a nice "starry night" background. For fog effects, I might use something more "in the scene" ie paint fx or something. Or if you don't want that, then paint one into your map using photoshop or somehting...

:beer:

[the3DBEAST]

awesome! thanx everyone. this has been a HUGE help :)

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