Hello all,
I am trying to create a star field using the particle system. the reason for using the particle system instead of using the stars section under the enviroment is because this gives me a lot more control. i can now zoom my camera past the stars giving me a cool effect. i have a problem however. i want the stars to animate so they fill up the area i want, but after they are done animating i want them to hold still so i can animate the camera. sadly they arent stopping and i cant figure out how to make them stop moving so i can animate my camera… any help?
thanks for the help in advance
[INDENT]Imtriggerhappy9[/INDENT]
Hi and welcome to the forum. I had a play around and the following recipe might help.
Create a plane and associate a particle system with the plane. In Field Weights, set Gravity to be 0. This means that once they stop, they won’t fall down. Then I set the Normal to 2.0 in the Velocity pane. I also set the Random velocity to 2.0. In the physics [ane, I set the Damp to be 0.05. Finally, I set the start and end frames to be -50, the lifetime to be 250 and the amount to be 100.
The key here is that the plane will emit particles with an initial velocity plus some random amount. The Damp setting will slow down the particles over time till they stop. Since there is no gravity, once they stop … they should stop.
Have a play and see if this works. You will probably want to tune settings for your project.
After searching a while (for my own star field using a sprite image sequence - with real star photo’s - mapped on particles on an UV sphere around my scene) ive found it.
My particle starfield options: Amount 30000, Start 1, End 1, Lifetime 1, Gravity 0 and make sure you click on the “died” option in the particle render panel. (Died makes sure youre particles don’t dissapear after there lifetime).
These options let me make an static starfield from frame one, that stays the same in my whole animation.