3DS stars
I don't know of a quick and easy way to do fly through stars, but this'll work
with a little patience:
Use stars.ixp or any other way you want to create a series of images (tga, gif,
jpeg, whatever). The more of these you create (all different starfields, of
course), the longer you'll be able to "fly" through them.
Use the images to create star materials. To do this use the image file both as
a texture map and as an opacity map, with the opacity slider set all the way to
100. To make the planes just creat a QUAD in the 2D shaper, then in the 3D
Editor do CREATE/OBJECT/GET SHAPE and import as many of these planes as you
need. They will have normals facing only one way, so if you plan on "turning
around" you'll want to make your material (stars) two sided. Then apply the
matierial with planar mapping, and place the planes one after another, with
enough space in between to give you a feeling of "largness".
The only drawbacks to this technique I can think of are rendering times
(opacity maps take a while to render), and you'll have to experiment to get the
look you want.
Good luck,
John Tissavary (La Luna cie)