Starfields Using Cycles Rending

HI All,

I thought I would share a setup I have found very useful when creating star fields in blender using cycles rendering.

All I ever need to do it setup the following background image properties(under the world settings window):

Set the background material to be “mix” and then add a colour ramp (black fading into white, where black takes up about 75% of the ramp) for the first colour and a noise texture for the FAC amount (I use a scale of about 200 - 250). By playing around with the settings you can get different star effects.

For example, I use the following settings for colour 1:


For colour 2 I use the same approach but add colouring into the ramp that will define gas clouds in space. The noise scale setup to be 4 gives a desirable result.

For example, I use the following settings for colour 2:


The last thing I do is uncheck the diffuse checkbox in the ray visibility drop down under world settings so that the starfield doesn’t overlap the shadowing on objects.

Using the settings above I get a very simple and quick space star field. The result of the settings above can be seen below:


Anyway, I hope this helps anyone who was wanting to do a space scene.

I find it a little harder to replicate this without a node setup.
it’s tricky to do,maybe this is just me.
Thanks for the tip!