There are likely many ways to do starfields in Blender, namely the built-in world buttons star generator. If you don’t like the look, here’s another way.
Build a cube. Give it a halo material. Make it star.
Press tab and W-Subdivide Fractal-any factor. Do this three more times. Leave EditMode.
Use the Decimator in the Edit Buttons to bring it down. If it sucks now, subdivide more.
Change the halo settings to your preference.
Render. Does that look good? If not, change a few things around.
The problem is that if the camera moves the stars move in a very unrealistic way.
So scale the cube up then!!!
I use a method which is fairly similar to this myself, and I find it gives much better results than the default starfield (ugh!!!).
My little tip to add to this is that all this can take a small lifetime to render(all those halos…). A quicker way to do it is to render out a very large res image with nothing but the stars in it, then in your final blend just map it to a sphere. Unless your cameras moving, in which case your methods better…
Depending on scenes, I use this one more often:
I create my scene, with clouds (because i’m worth it : )
I light my scene correctly
then I create a huge hemisphere squashed along the vertical axis and
I give it a black color and a fairly reasonable amount of emit.
finally I apply a fixnoise texture in the emit channel.
I somtimes apply it through the alpha channel too.
Here’s what I do (it’s lame, but I’m gonna say it…):
I added a UVsphere. Scaled it so it can be REALLY HUGE!!!
Then I applied an image texture, of a real starfield (with stars…etc.). From the texture buttons I xrepeat and yrepeat it several times, so it can be big enough to take over the whole sphere and adjusted brightness to 0.883 and contrast to 1.771!!! I also played a bit with the R,G,B, sliders…
Here’s the resault:
The only drawback to this technic is that you will need several lamps to light the sphere uniformly. But then again it would be a nice realistic effect if you didn’t…
Spyros.
p.s.: The planet seems crappy because I forgot to press the OSA button… I always forget that along with SetSmooth button ( :x )… Gee, I guess I am getting old… ( )
P.S. valarking u sig always makes me laugh cause it’s funny. /me looks around at everybody else (there mad) “accualy yours isn’t that great just sorta funny well now that i think about it every body elses is better, yours sucks theres is awsome, PLEASE DON’T HURT ME!” starts screaming madly
The difference between what I did and LethalSideP’s suggestion, is that I haven’t used a big high res image of stars to map it on my sphere…
Can you believe that I used a thumbnail size image (I didn’t have anything better when I was modelling that scene… )!!!
If you play with different buttons and sliders in the textures Buttons window, you can make really good effects… .
S68, personally I don’t find any dissadvantage of Blender’s built in stars, except that working with image maps, can produce more realistic effects (if you know what you are doing… ). Apart from that, I guess it’s a nice thing to experiment and not depend only in the built in’s…
The big advantage with this method of mine is that it doesn’t take anywhere as long to render (it’s only an image, as opposed to lots and lots and lots of halos, which can take a lifetime). Blender’s star system also takes a lot of tweaking to make it look good , but with this method you just render once, then you’re happy for a lifetime
The main thing I don’t like about the Blender system is that by default, the stars are right next to you, they’re very big, and there are too few of them (look at any decent sci-fi render and you’ll see what I mean). In order to use Blender’s star system, you have to use so many stars that your viewport almost always turns to white (mine does, anyway - sometimes I even get a console message - ‘Too many stars’), and you need to turn their size right down. I just don’t like the way you really have to stretch the star generator to get something good enough. I’m sure there are people here who’ll disagree with me, and will shout/flame me down. I guess it’s personal tastes.
What I do for starfields is render a high res texture in blender…put that on a sphere thats around a scene…now you dont see yourself shooting by a star when you fly slower the lightspeed…now do you?
If you want to create a sense of speed…you’ll need more objects for a spaceship to interact with…(asteriods, debris, nebulas, ships etc, ect)
Yeah, it is a drawback if you do it that way. Why don’t you simply set the star material to “Shadeless”, that way you don’t need any lamps at all for the starfield…
Anyway I have taken advantage of this drawback… I did it this way, because I wanted to give a more realistic effect on my scene… I’ll explain!!! Imagine that you face the sun… The sun light blinds you so you can’t see the stars, if you understand what I mean… Well, if you notice the stars on the right of the planet, are less visible than those on the left… I figured that the suns reflection on the planets surface should blind us a bit giving a similar effect in reality!!!
So I added a lamp behind the planet, and directed it so it would light the stars on the left, a little bit more than the stars on the right…
I don’t know if it’s a nice idea… anyway that’s what I did!!!
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