galaxy2.jpg is where I drew a green grid, and labeled the spiral arms. I also placed tiny cross hairs on the location of various nebulae, supernovae, and whatnot. I made a black and white version to use as an emit map.
galaxy3.jpg is the Blender render. I mapped the galaxy image on a basic plane with both the color map and the emit map, moved the camera to a dramatic angle, added a couple of single-vertex objects with a halo texture to make glitzy stars, and another single vertex halo to make the yellow blob in the center.
galaxy4.jpg is post production in Adobe Photoshop. The tiny cross hairs were still visible. I used them to place symbols for the various objects. You can see a larger version here: http://www.projectrho.com/portfolio/port21.html
It took about a day and a half to get it finished, but the Blender part only took about half an hour. It would have taken me weeks to do that spiral in perspective by hand. Again Blender made it easy.
that looks great! the icons, font and line weights are all right on. my only suggestion is that maybe the pink color is a tiny bit hard to read especially on the words that are curving upside down. but over all it really looks nice. i’m curious to know what this is for.
edit: after checking out your site, i’m guessing that it is part of project rho. (but i don’t really know what that’s all about yet)
It worked so well that I am planning on making a poster just of the galaxy, with more locations plotted.
The poster needs artwork at 300 DPI, the blank space was about a foot square. So the final render was a monstrous 4666 by 3500. My poor computer could just barely manage Blender cranking out such a huge render. The Adobe Photoshop file is about 60 megabytes.
thats a great picture! i suggest some stars in the back ground but besides that i think its good.
*i also agree with Treatkor the pink is hard to read. either enlarge it or find a different color
