Greetings, this is my first post on Blender Artists Forums.
I’ve been dabbling around with Blender for about a year and a half, marvelling at all the cool stuff I find out every time I do a new project. I’ve been doing spaceships more or less exclusively, improving all the time, and now I’ve started thinking about animations.
So my question is, as you might have guessed from the thread topic, do anyone here have experience with outer space boxes or spheres?
The main point here is that I use Photoshop to paint detailed star backgrounds for my still pictures (yeah, you guessed it: Greg Martin’s starfield tutorial), and wish to apply such backgrounds for my animations.
From where I stand, there seems, for me, to be three alternatives to consider:
1: The box. Only six faces to texture and fit together. But will this give me a smooth view of space? Will not the box shape be visible?
2: The sphere. Making an icosphere at lowest possible subdivision, UVmapping one or two triangles at a time. Subdivide/set smooth. Less “boxy” effects, but a lot of small faces to paint (and fit together, mind you…), rather than just six big.
3: The other: Simply a black background (or sphere, to get a definite border), with lots of individual transparent planes with star clusters/nebulae facing the centre. Easy to alter, but also time- (and render-)consuming to get right.
Would anyone care to comment on this? Point out the fatal errors and show me the right path?
I forgot to emphasize this: I am already aware, more or less, of the possibilities to create a space background with the built-in Blender tools. The Cogfilm tutorial, especially, is very cool. But the “star” function seems to give just a random, even pattern of white dots. I want control over my star placement, to put a bunch of stars over there, and leave an open space here, and so on.
The cogfilm nebula looks good, but I’m aiming for much higher levels of detail, for the aforementioned Photoshopped nebulae of which I have several tutorials. Most likely, I could, with a lot of time, trial-and-failure and experience, create something similar with built-in Blender tools. But it seems to me these would be pretty heavy on the render side, added to the ship(s) that would be in the area as well.
With Photoshopped stars and nebuale, however, it becomes the (obviously not so) simple matter of texturing the inside of a shape of some sort. That was my initial conclusion, after having considered Blender functions, and my reason for making this thread and putting it in the Texturing & Lighting directory.
take the nasa hubble images, texture them to a BIG plane, constrain it to always face the camera. Move it REALLY far away from your model (in the galactic direction it should be, light it. observe pretty horsehead nebula in background.
I’ve got another possibility:
Create a background scene with it’s camera having all look controls as the main cam. he main cam will obviously be in the main scene.
Use blender 2.45. Choose all yo UV faces paint your texture on a as detailed as you want sphere, then press COPY DRAW MODE (this button is unfortunatly missing in more recent versions). Set that scene to bckground in the main scene.
The advantage of this technique is that no matter how far you move in space, your sky box will be there, and you can look around. The skybox can even be small.
