Hey all. I’ve been trying to recreate some spacescapes in Blender. Leaving some room for artistic interpretation, this is a first result for a Wolf-Rayet star. WRs expel some of their mass, creating nebulae.
Fly-Through Video:
http://www.vimeo.com/1121570 (somewhat better quality)
Here’s a higher-quality still:
The hourglass shape is not that uncommon.
Isn’t the star supposed to be like a lot bigger? (like the wiki said?) Nice materials, though, very…spacey.
Thank you. 
Regarding size, the hourglass nebula (with WR at its center) actually makes this one big by comparison.
I did take some artistic liberties.
Would you be at all interested in sharing how you did this? I am working on something similar to this and would be curious to know how you went about it.
No prob.
First, the colors. Emissive nebulae (ionized by big stars) are mostly red, with some yellow and possibly smidges of green. Reflective nebulae are the approximate color of the nearby stars, blue-tinted due to scattering. Dark clouds (mostly heavier, denser, molecular gas) is reddish-brown to black depending on density and lighting conditions. It’s not rare to find all three types of gas in a single cloud.
Many nebulae are composed of expanding shells. Others look fuzzier as they’re made up of accumulating, dense solar winds. If I’ve got surfaces, I’d model them by hand --even if I decide they should be ‘fuzzier’ and used as particle emitters-- which is what I did with the ‘hourglass’.
The darker dust cloud started as two pyramids touching at the tips. It’s the most vertex-dense object I have, so the halos are smaller and harder (plus, it went through a sharpen filter in the composer, though the erode filter was also a good choice). I tinted it a dark reddish-brown hue and composed in using a burn mixer.
The diffuse clouds are less dense particles with bigger halos. I used an edge-finding filter to add structure to them.
You do need the composer for this. The ignited gases in a nebula do work in a way that resembles the add mixer. Denser, more opaque clouds exhibit some backface scattering. I didn’t use it because I wanted a more ‘vaporous’ cloud.