I made an add-on that lets you import up to more than 3,750 stars into your blender viewport based on scientific data. You can then explore their positions, features and movement in the blender viewport or use the imported stars to render beautiful star maps, scientific images and more.
The add-on menu is accessible through a sidebar panel. This add-on works for blender 2.8+.
Here is a short trailer that shows some of its features:
Main features:
Limit the amount of imported stars based on distance from Earth, spectral classes, apparent magnitude and more
Display the stars’ names in the viewport
Place the stars in galactic or celestial coordinates
Watch how the stars move over time based on their proper motion and radial velocity
Simulate the night sky: All stars are projected onto a sphere and their apparent magnitude is used for emission
Automatically connect the stars to show star constellations
Version history:
v1.0.1: The stars’ emission strength in night sky mode now properly scales with the Luminosity setting.
Viewport renders of star constellations in Eevee. With the settings used here, the stars are placed in 3D space, have relative radii and are connected through star constellation lines. A more realtistic representation of the night sky is possible with the night sky mode option.
Version 1.1 of my 3D Star Map Add-on has just been released and includes the following new main features:
Earth rotation: The generated map can now be rotated based on time, date and the position of an observer
Shifted center: The center point of the generated map can now be changed to a custom point
Print data to console: Star data that is used for map generation can now be printed to blender’s console based on the chosen filters
New options that give you further control over the generated map
These new features allow you for example to see how the night sky looks today at your location or let you generate an approximation of the night sky as seen from a different star system.
Long exposure images of how the night sky appears to rotate because of the Earth rotation can for example be created with this new version by using motion blur:
Hi, this is great.
I am just about to look into this, do to basicly the same.
However, you say, that you have 3,750 Stars and a I can retell, there are more than 5000 Stars vissible to the naked Eye.
Would be great to have all of them and maybe even more, for Space scenes…
The data the add-on uses to generate the star maps in blender is stored in a local csv file. The main reason why this list only includes about 3,750 stars is that a good portion of the information in the list was gathered manually. Secondly, for many stars I was also unable to easily find more detailed information regarding many characteristics featured in the add-on. Just adding an empty that is supposed to represent the location of a star or ‘guessing’ things like radius or temperature for a specific star didn’t seem like the right thing to do.
That being said, I would like to add more stars to the list in the future, as well as develop new features for the add-on, but I currently lack the time to properly work on and develop my blender add-ons.
However, given that the data used to generate the map in blender is just stored in a csv file, you can easily extend the list yourself if desired.
It works very well.