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.