So this came totally by accident. I was trying to make a procedural cloud shader for a render and as an exercise in node use and was using ringed wave textures to try and create a smooth cut-off when the clouds reached the edge of a mesh and realized that at certain parameters I got the ringed cloud formation and I decided to pursue it for fun and ended up with some nice looking nebula formations. So this is all custom with no Curtis Holt involved
.Rendered with Sheepit and cycles and done in 2.90. Plan to use the renders for another project.
The top render is what I would consider the final render and the bottom was an early test. Compositing and after-effects like the little spikes on the stars done in Paint.Net.
The Stars were done using a volume particle system and low poly spheres emitting slightly colored light (to simulate the different hotness of stars). (Gonna put a .blend file on Blendswap in case anyone is intrested to see how I did it and use it for themselves).
If anyone wonders why I use color nodes rather than math nodes its because I have a hard time grasping the math nodes so I tend to stick to very visual means, hence most of the “math” for this is done with color. (Hope that makes sense.)
(edit to fix spelling mistakes)