STARS
 

How do i create stars in maya. Other than the paint effect 2d one.

If you wanted stars that look small and bright, then you could take a sphere, apply a white colored shader to it, then double click on the white shader and then open special effects tab in the attribute editor and then slide up the glow a bit. When you render this will make that white ball glowing, kinda what you see in the sky. If you want a fake yellow star, first model it, then apply a yellow shader and add the glow like in the first example :D.. hope this helped.

I use particles

create an omni emitter
set the rate to about 5000
set the max distance to about 810
set the min distance to about 800 (for the min and max distance you can set them much higher, but remember to adjust the clipping distanc of the camera)

set the speed to 0


Then you just hit play until you have enought particles
when you have enough, press stop, select the particles and in the dynamics menu set go to Solvers -> Initial State -> Set for selected

go back to beginning of the timerange and delete the emitter.

You would then have to go into the particles attribute editor and adjust give the stars more random color/size/brightness

render the stars as a seperate layer and add a slight glow in post-production

In addition to what everyone else said, you could also create a large sphere and map a starfield texture to it. Not a great idea if you want glows and whatnot...but if you want a static background, it works. That being said, most of the ones I've seen built in Maya were done using particles or PaintFX. I've attached a very small, very quick avi test of a starfield fly-through I did using paintfx and a NURBS sphere. You can get a general idea of how it looks with paintfx even if you don't want to go that route.

I like this as it seems to give a lot of control over your scene. I like 3d starfields just in case I decide I might want to do an animation.

In Lightwave, I would create a sphere and rotate slightly and duplicate. Doing that several times, I would then change polys to points and apply glow, color, size, etc. to the points and get a good starfield from that. But I don't think you can change a polygon sphere to points only in Maya..not sure though.

You could with some fancy MEL scripting.

But that is efectively the same as u described. You would need to do some very simple MEL expressions when adjusting the particles properties in the Atribute Editor, but it took me about 5 minutes to find the commands I needed in the online help

Using the particle method, how would you randomize the colors, glows, and brightness in the attrib editor?

Would you actually have to create several emitters and apply attributes to the particles created in each emitter?

Hmm...This WOULD be a great script for somebody who can code it...

Hint! Hint!

I am currently working on a project right now where I need a background of stars to show movement among some asteroids...

I made a giant sphere with a modified leather texture. Leather?! Yes, leather. Just make the cell size white and very small and the vein size large and black and it looks EXACTLY like stars, and renders relatively quickly. =]

Oculus, could post a pic of your starfield?

I would love to see the result of this. What an interesting way to create a starfield!

I've seen that method somewhere before...either here or at highend. I think I tried it but either couldn't get it working properly or wasn't satisfied with the end result. You can't animate the star glows and all that, can you? You're just creating a static background, right?

I think a decent starfield will have a variety of sizes, colors, and brightness.

If each point is lighted in such a way and is positioned around the scene, then it has that true 3d quality to it.

When I get back home to my computer, I'll try and remember to post a pic of my starfield. It actually looks real... it has various sizes of stars - some so faint and some that really stand out.

If you are viewing the stars from space, you don't want them to twinkle, because they only twinkle due to the Earth's atmosphere warping the light. In space, most of the stars (with an exeption of few) are static.

If your camera is going to be still, then you would probobly be better to paint a background in paint fx, but if you need the stars to move in the background, then make a sphere, flip the normals and apply some sort of texture to it.

I'll post a pic of my stars soon. =]

I quickly made this up

supplying the scene file too, so you can see the expressions

Scene File

http://www.btinternet.com/~scorpy/stars_test.jpg

It looks like you have a good number there. Can you create a more random variation in color brightness ,etc.

Thanks for the scene file. I'll load it up and see what I can do with it.

Meanwhile, here is a pic I did in Lightwave 7 about a year ago...it is the type of look I am trying to duplicate in Maya....

I think the Lightwave version looks a bit more realistic than the particles....maybe it's just that there are too many. It reminds me of the "creating stars in photoshop" technique as far as the end result....add mono noise then blur. There are many methods to the madness so I guess whatever works for each person....well there ya go. ;)

Yes, the mind boggles at the number of ways to achieve one effect.

The pic I did in Lightwave was done with the multiple spheres, that way I could animate a ship flyby, or a space battle and give it a true 3d look to it.

If I was doing a wallpaper image or other static pic, then the process seems much more straightforward.

Ok, just playing around tonight. I'm attaching 2 images....the first starfield is done with Oculus' leather texture method. The 2nd is paintFX, not painting a sphere, but adjusting the scene color to black and painting the scene at depth. If Anything, folks can see the results of the various methods.

So without further adieu...here's the leather texture connected to the color node of a blinn (all specularity turned to 0 basically and everything else adjusted to what oculus said...once you start fiddling, it's basically common sense).

I'm kinda digging this one for a distant star background....really reminds me of the original star wars backgrounds.

Ok...now here's the paintFX version. Different than the leather version in that you get subtle glow and size differences but I dig this one as well.

As cool as the particle version seems, I think I need to see it tweaked a bit more.

Anyway, I think we answered the original question. ;) Good thread, guys! Nice to see so many ways to achieve a solution.

Thanks for the pics, Nitroliq.

Yep, the more ideas, the better...