In my experience, a textured sphere
can work pretty good,
You can tile an image (3-4 times on a sphere) with a tilable "base star texture" (as uniform as possible) large enough to hold enough subtle variations without perceiving patterns (perhaps 1.5-3x the size of your final render res), If you are using Photoshop, from a say 1or2k rez. small-star starfield pic, (to make a 2-3k final pic) you can do a 'filter->offset' by any odd amount, and then breakup the seams to make it tilable -- super-easy specially for stars, you can use a speckly brush clone stamp with high opacity (so no opacity gradient falloffs) and a low brush step, (so 1 stamp at every ~20 pixels on strokes for very random cloning) So you can make a relatively 'mostly uniform ' star map density as a base BG, ( with many-many dim (almost subpixel) stars, a a number of mediums, and really just a couple of bright ones, all with a bit of cloudy variations ) if there arent enough dimer ones, or to add density or (uniformize?), you can use a big clone stamp with that speckle-y brush, but in additive (linear dodge) mode at varying opacity also with that now-tilable pic, you can scale it down 50% & tile it 4 times in half opacity (linear dodge) for those many faint BG stars Then, with those hubble pics, you can isolate interesting areas, make the rest transparent, and in 3d, add grids in key spots to add localized cloudy nebula patterns and variations depending on what you're after (with RGB intensity as opacity) If you really need 360 (up & down) with a spherical projection, you'll probably want to mix-in a copy of that starfield texture for any stretching at the poles of the sphere. I used a very speckle-y gradient (made of "fat noise") with a white to black radial "fat noise gradient" in the center as an alpha for the same stars texture, to project vertically top down (x-z) You can also blend the star textures somewhat more than 1 in 3d so that some stars can "bleed" a bit with perhaps an additive blurred version of just those hot pixels. That may be enough on it's own, but if you are moving around (at light speed?) you can also add 3D stars, Adams tips seems like an excellent approach to that :) .. good luck! :) Jason On 06/23/14 17:50, Adam Sale wrote:
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- Ideas for star fields? Nancy Jacobs
- Re: Ideas for star fields? Adam Sale
- Re: Ideas for star fields? Nancy Jacobs
- Re: Ideas for star fields? Jason S
- Re: Ideas for star fie... Nancy Jacobs
- Re: Ideas for star... Luc-Eric Rousseau
- Re: Ideas for star... Jason S
- RE: Ideas for star fields? Ponthieux, Joseph G. (LARC-E1A)[LITES]
- RE: Ideas for star fields? Ponthieux, Joseph G. (LARC-E1A)[LITES]
- RE: Ideas for star fie... Matt Lind
- Re: Ideas for star... Nancy Jacobs
- RE: Ideas for... Matt Lind
- Re: Ideas... Ed Manning
- Re: Ideas for star fields? Nancy Jacobs