making a space battle

I am not sure how to go about getting the proper sense of depth with my stars. should I use a skybox, or a massive particle system? both perhaps?
(edit) I am using BI btw.
(edit) I tried a plain skybox and it doesn’t look too bad, but I am still open to suggestions.

Most sci-fi shows stars as being many orders of magnitude too close. Star Trek is a particularly egregious example. The stars really should just be a skybox; their distance is such that the parallax due to ship-sized motion would be unobservably tiny. Unless your space ship is several light-years long or something, which would just be silly. You could use particles on the surface of your skybox just as a way of generating the star field in the first place, but really the stars should just be an environment map, infinitely distant for render purposes.

That said, it kind of kills off the star field as a cool setting for your battle. Personally I think space battles look best when they are close to a planetary body so that there is an interesting environment to interact with. Asteroid fields are kind of a bust though if you’re going for semi-realism; they are so far apart that if you’re close to one the others will just look like dull shiny spots in the distance, barely registering as anything but nearby stars. Nebulas also aren’t all that interesting close up. Even if brightly colored in the visible spectrum the gas is still thin enough that it would only color the distance while space near the camera would remain completely transparent.

I’ll tell you what would look cool that I haven’t really seen done much: a space battle around a planetary ring like on Saturn. Even those are thinner than they look from the ground, but it would be much more realistically dynamic than most cliched space backdrops.

k horseman, thanks for the reply. I agree, the skybox seems to be the best way. I tried using particle systems on huge spheres and layering them, and it threw off the scale imo. I like your rings idea, but it has to be asteroids because it is based on a story. basically, a fighter ship encounters enemy ships in an asteroid belt, a blast from the enemy mothership strikes a nearby asteroid and a chunk of it flies into the fighter, damaging it. the escape pod, which is also damaged, fires out into space, and drifts toward a nearby sun, burning up as it gets nearer.

do you have an early version of blender if you do you can go into world settings and turn on stars.
i think its before the 2.7 series.

I don’t know the story, so I don’t know how flexible it is for you to change, but there are a few things to consider if you’re in a position to fiddle with the details of the story. A planetary ring could perhaps still meet those story mechanic requirements better than an asteroid belt.

Asteroids are thousands of miles from their nearest neighbors at best. A planetary ring is made of chunks of rock and ice that range in size from coarse dust to meters across, perfect for most asteroid field battle requirements, but unlike an asteroid belt this debris is actually still close enough together to be exciting.


Bonus, they usually contain stable orbits where a moon (or a space station, natch) can be safely tucked away, or for an ambush to be hidden. They’re thick enough that you have a three dimensional debris field to play with as long as your ships aren’t too crazy huge.

And one other advantage over asteroid belts: asteroid belts that we’ve observed aren’t anywhere near their parent star. A drifting ship would take months at least, more likely years to fall into a nearby star, but burning up entering the upper atmosphere of the gas giant that the ring is around would be just as exciting and visually cool (more even, because colors) and get rid of the distance problem since the fight would take place in orbit around the gas giant in question. Falling into the swirling clouds of superhot gas of the nearby gas giant would be just as much a threat to the ship as the star that’s 300 million kilometers away.

Most sci-fi completely fails to take distance into account, but misses opportunities for similarly scripted scenes that would still work well on a realistic scale. If, for instance, this scene is set in an asteroid belt just because it’s a good environment for an ambush, it might not be as good as you think, and this alternative might give you better excuses for cool stuff to happen. The script change might be a simple find-and-replace job. But I don’t know your situation. If not for your project, maybe this will give someone else a cool idea. I can’t wait to see what you come up with!

I think I’m sold on the planetary rings. and having the planet there is nice too. @ midnightcpu: true, but with the blender stars, the distance is also unrealistic. It would be cool if blender had a system for faking vast distances without making your scene of galactic proportions. the skybox actually works pretty well though.

i have a scene in my movie that involves intergalactic combat but, its to complex to model everything in one scene i would have to green screen everything.
talking battle ships, fighters, mechs, explosions, fire fights ect.
the works.

a skydome would work but you would have to get a high res image then add a smidgen of glare on the stars randomly and animate the glare some how from “on to off”

just remembered that their is a tut for cycles with stars you could do that then render it at what res you want the put on dome in BI

I decided to do it with the blender internal renderer, mostly because I am more familiar with the materials system. I ended up making a wrapping sky dome at 2048 x 2048 pixels and set my lens to 50, and it seems to work pretty well so far.

If you have the ship falling into the planet’s atmosphere, you’ll have a nice opportunity to do really cool things with the smoke sim. I can’t wait to see your progress.

this is the planet i did for my scene a year ago never finished the scene i can make it look like its rotating by rotating the texture on the top.
i used the tut for orb to make this.
it would look more real if i put some kind of surface in the middle.
this was done in BI


cool man. it’s been a long time since I made a planet. I have a couple of good tricks though. check out the link in my signature ( a little outdated ). also m@dcow came up with a nice technique for making atmospheric halos by placing a high density circle ( unfilled ) with a halo material around the planet, and tracking it to the camera.

I found this Blendswap file useful in matching real scale to Starships sizes.

I read that the starfield in the background for scenes in Voyager and TNG was simply a black curtain with sequins sewed randomly all over the surface. Then the curtain was slowly moved by the stage crew.

I wonder if an AddOn could approximate that look by vertex parenting convex surfaces randomly to a cloth sim?

thanks man, that is interesting. as I recall, the teleporter effect in the original star trek was made by shaking up some glitter in a jar of water.