CompuServe Thread

Although I'm certainly no starfield expert, Darrin, I could give you a little food for thought, at least. I believe someone here recently mentioned that one of the major considerations for big, deep starfields is multiple layers. You could try a backround object with LOTS small of stars mapped to it for the farther layer, and perhaps a couple of layers of the Stars.IXP for the closer ones. I haven't tried this myself yet, but after watching quite a few space scenes quite closely, I feel this is something to consider. Maybe someone else here can give some good advice… Good luck! -Alan

First, instead of using a 2-sided material, which will increase your render time, use Surface/Normals/Object Flip to make the INside of the sphere opaque and the outside transparent. Then, you might try using the summed-area filter method instead of the default pyramidal (set this by clicking on the "S" setup button next to the texturemap name in the mat-ed). Note that using summed-area takes a LOT more memory. You could also try decreasing texture blur. Double check to make sure your spherical mapping icon is CENTERED on the sphere, otherwise you'll get distortion, and, if your starfield is random (as opposed to showing real constellations, etc), you might find that by scaling it down (with the U/V scale factors in the texturemap setup dialog) you can increase the sharpness/decrease the size of the individual dots. Also, don't forget to use Modify/Object/Attributes to turn OFF the "Casts Shadows" item as well as the "Receives Shadows" item in the sphere's dialog. Dave

Hi Darrin, I just finished an animation of the near planets, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and Earth. Here's what I worked out that was fairly quick and effective: For the "Flying into Space" effect with stars moving towards and past the camera, I created a starfield 240 frames long with a star count of ~2000 – 5000 with Animator Pro. I changed the color palette to a white to black gradient for all frames. This yields a 240 frame animation with stars of varying brightness flying towards the viewer. You need to vary the length of the flick to vary the apparent "speed" at which you fly. I then go to VPost and used starfield to generate a static starfield background. the next layer is the starfield animation with psudo alpha to reveal the static star background. Play with the various variables to get the correct density of stars. I then grabbed some of the galaxy pictures from the Astro' forum, idi a simple animation to scale the galaxy from the center of the screen, rendered them with alpha and comp'ed them with the stars. The look I was after resembled the opening to the Carl Sagan PBS show "Cosmos" and I came pretty close to that kind of effect. The planets were more difficult, but you souded like all you wanted was stars. Now if the camera pans, the stars in the background pan while the moving stars continue to fly by. Hope this helps, Tom

>>Am I going about this all wrong? >>I'd appreciate some advice from >>you seasoned experts. . .Thanks! In my opinion, yes. If you had to do a sky-background, the inverted-huge-sphere techniques is currently the way to go. But for starfields, nothing beats rendering out of video-post using stars.ixp. You can put down multiple layers of different sized stars by putting down multiple entries of stars with different settings. And you can set star density with the starmake.exe program. Jim