Need help with realistic stars and nebulas (using nodes)

[Borgleader]

NOTE: This is my first attempt at node usage without some else’s layout to copy from, so please excuse any n00bish errors

Hi,

so I was looking through the Finished Projects & Forum Gallery sections, and looked at a few space ship threads, and noticed that almost all the backgrounds were 2D. And well, seeing as blender is such a powerful application, I figured there might have been a way to recreate these in 3D.

I’m think mainly PTKS’s HAWK Fighter model, and Earth seen from outer space (Zordan’s).

So anyway, my plan was to use blender’s internal star feature and then do something like this.

-Select only the stars
-Blur them (gauss)
-Make them brighter (add node)
-Alter their color slightly using a cloud pattern and three colors (red for black, blue for gray, and purple for white).

Or something similar. Although i only managed one color alteration, and it would most likely affect everything else on the layer (although all I’d have to do to fix this is make 2 render layers, first only affecting layer 1 (the stars) and layer 2 englobing all the other layers and their content).

Layout
Result

Help?

[Borgleader]

In case the first post wasnt clear, I made a visual representation of what Id want to re-create with nodes.

So basically the Alpha value coming from the clouds texture (or some such similar thing) would be used to select which color the stars will become and then be added in the render. That way the stars would be different colors and the colors would change at “random”.

[way2lazy2ca]

I don’t get the relationship between the gradient and the last picture… I are confused…

[Borgleader]

Basically, what I want to do is use a precedural texture (clouds or something else) use it to choose the color of the stars. So, lets say at a certain point on the clouds texture its black, in the final render it would be pink (for example) if its gray is would be blue, if its white it’ll be purple.