Could you please bring these two panels back?

Sorry for repeating this thread, but I did it just in case you don’t approve it to Blender and CG Discussion topic?

Anyway, will the stars panel and particle hair shape keys be brought back for any versions of Blender? I was looking forward to use these extensions until finding out they’re not included in version 2.7 and forward. I also can’t switch back to older versions cause the models I made aren’t backward-compatible which also sucks.

In fact, I don’t think these two panels were removed for propriate reason, so they deserve to come back even though it costs a human life or something.

Can I at least have any response or hope considering these panels, please :(?

I don’t know about the particle hair shape keys but at least the stars panel will not be coming back: The Devs removed it because it was quite oldish and not well-coded and didn’t work for cycles as well. You will have to create a star background on your own for more recent versions of blender (use a texture or a point cloud / particles)

Cycles this, cycles that. Must anything go around with that faulty feature? So what if stars panel doesn’t work on cycles? It still works in internal render. Not everyone uses cycles and doesn’t have to. In fact they could at least make an identical/alike substitute that works in both internal and cycle renders.

Also, texture won’t give enough threedimensionality to starsky and mesh with halo particle would hit the objects, unlike the original starsky, which’s stars don’t come that close to camera.

And what do you mean with pointcloud? Tried to look for information about it, but I didn’t find proper looking results.

Then that particle hair shape keys, here’s video about it:

Offtoptic: There’s a fangame I’m making, but I need help with it. If you’d like to volunteer, go check this thread for further info:

You shouldn’t need three dimensionality for a starfield, because stars are so far away there can’t be any kind of parallax visible.

You’re wrong about the old star system when you said stars didn’t come close the the camera. They very often did, so it was better for simulating small particles in the air around your scene than actual stars.

Anyway, a sky texture should do the job perfectly. There will be loads you can find online if you don’t feel up to creating one yourself.

If your project really does need that three dimensionality, an easy way to create a point cloud would be to create a very large object (doesn’t really matter what type but a cube or sphere will be fine), add a particle system set to emit from volume rather than face or vertex, emit for just one frame and turn off all physics. Hey Presto! One three dimensional starfield!

You might need to play with all the other settings to get exactly what you want, but this should give you a good starting point.

But what about this kind of scenes?

This is what old star system handles better than flat, textured starfield or mesh with halo material.

I could return to older version, but if I use characters with particle hair, will particle hair of newer version(s) be backward compatible or will they mess up?

In my last post I gave you an idea of how this can be achieved. Read it again, paying special attention to the bit about particle systems. Once the particles are set up you can assign them a halo material or, if preferred, create objects for your stars and allocate them to the particles in the particle render tab.

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