Attached Link: http://gallery.artofgregmartin.com/

Well, in my 2 day website induced "vacation" from Renderosity...I caught up on checking out art on some of my other favorite sites. I ran across an artist that was so good at what he does I couldn't believe I had gone this long without seeing his stuff before. He does 2D Photoshop made art, a LOT of space/star scenes. Sounds simple, but what he does is inspirational (to me, anyways).

Anyway, his cool art aside, he has some 2D tutorials on his site, one is a page on how to make realistic star fields. I ran through it with my Photoshop and in like 15 minutes had something better than I had ever imagined I could do. It's worth checking out. He has other tutorials, but I love the star field one!

His name is Greg Martin, and I originally caught his work at;
http://www.gfxartist.com/
(Which is an amazing place for 2D art, they have some 3D art also)

Greg's site is at;
http://gallery.artofgregmartin.com/
(That's where the tutorials are at)

AgentSmith

This was the first (15 minute) attempt. Trust me, it's great compared to the other crud I had tried making before! AS

A must see for sure! His planet tut is superb as well. Excellent link pal! :)

That's amazing, thank you very much for the link

Simply awesome. Haha if anyone noticed he makes fun of bryce in the 2nd part of the "details" step. I think we can let him go, this time ;-)

Here's my first try. I messed up with the erasing step so I have no "clumps" of stars.
Click here for a 2500x2500 pixel version (4MB file):

Attached Link: http://www.flamingpear.com/

Lunar Cell exports layers for 3D programs, so you can create a texture, a cloud map, a specularity map and so on for your basic sphere. This was a five minutes work. Excellent plugin.

Aye, not sure about Lunar Cell, everything it does can be done with more power and control right inside Bryce, Erlik. Also, Bryce can of course animate such a planet, Lunar Cell cannot. But I LOVE some of FP's other effects, and couldn't live without Aetherize or Melancholytron these days! Thanks for the link, AS, it's always good to expand ones' Horizons!

Curious..the one time I looked at Photoshop, it cost about $800..I am seriously wondering if that's the version everyone is using..I'm one of the 3 people on 'rosity who still uses photopaint..;)

Hey Pakled, I another PP user! I discovered Greg Martin's via Digital Blasphemy's User Galleries. I do agree with your assessment AS!

photoshop at full retail is $650 I rely on academic discounts to get my prices down. With academic pricing, photoshop costs $279 and even a better deal, the entire creative suite containing photoshop, illustrator, golive, indesign, and acrobat pro is $379 bundle-buying if for sure the way to go with adobe.

BTW this is not OT! This technique gives you cool starfield images to use on a 2d face backdrop in bryce in lieu of the internal starfield sky. Just remember to turn off cast shadows/receive shadows/self shadows! I used a similar technique on Big Red Button/Observors/Fly-by images.

SDL, I'm not certain that everything that can be done with Lunar Cell can be done in Bryce. Maybe I don't know, but I don't think you can get such realistic planetary textures in Bryce. though, to realize the full potential, you should play with them in Bryce. :-) Of course, being a PS plugin, it cannot animate anything, but as you said, you can do animations in Bryce.

I use Photoshop 7. VERY fortunately, it was just the price of an upgrade and even that was covered by my boss. I convinced him "we" needed it, lol. But, if I am to upgrade to the new Photoshop CS (8.0), I'll probably have to pay for that by myself ($170-upgrade). Flaming Pear's "Lunar Cell" is quite cool, but yes it is a trade-off, while it can make very neat looking planets quickly, they cannot be animated, but can work very well for a static background. (*pic shown here is from Lunar Cell) AgentSmith

Really good tuts there AS, thank you. 8) Catlin

Thanks for the link AS, these are great tuts and I've been looking for something like these for a long time.

My original Photoshop 4 was bought when Photoshop 6 came out, and was only 200 bucks or so. About a month after we bought that one, I found Photoshop 5 at Half-Price Books, along with Bryce 3D, Poser 3, Amorphium, and Ray Dream Studio. Wonderfully, I paid much, much less than half price for those packages... Creeponomics. About a year after I was done with those we sold them back to Half-Price books, paid off some bills with all that change...!

Excellent tuts AS. Thank you very much for the link. 8)

got a better one done, [see it here](http://www.renderring.com/nebula1.jpg) using the clouds filter along with distort>glass for nebular effects. This might be a fun contest/cooperative material thing (people make skies, then upload for others to use. much like the DTE challenge)

Cool, here's a small section of a 1600 by 1600 image I did using this technique, I think it's pretty cool. Agent smith, I like how it looks like that star was spiriling around leaving a trail behind it, that's really cool. I'm going to upload the whole image to my ftp at some point. Am I on the right track?

Here's another section of the image. Had to save them at 7 quality, so they look a little fuzzy.

AS, what I don't understand is that "cannot be animated". The pic I posted is a Lunar Cell texture rendered in Bryce. What prevents me from animating it? Unfortunately, only a flyby or a space scene cause it wouldn't stand for a fly-in. But then, a Bryce planet wouldn't stand for it, either and you'd need MojoWorld to properly animate a planet landing.

Sweet work people, love the drama that come out of those! Actually, what I meant was it can't be animated in the way that; you couldn't texture and spin a sphere easily/nicely with a Lunar Cell made texture, you couldn't swirl/animate your clouds, etc like you could directly in Bryce. But, yeah a more static planet shot would still work great in an animation. Which is really what I see most, say in the star wars movies or similar. It's the ships flying past the background of a planet and star field that would be the main focus of movement in that animation. Yup, if you're gonna land on the planet, MojoWorld would be my first choice. AS

Thanks for the link, AgentSmith :)) I especially like the tut about "Winter Mist", what an awesome image!!! JD

Yeah, I played with this one the other day as well. I used his planet tutorial and tried my best to combine the two...

The planet looks rather un-natural, but kind of a cool effect anyways! I really wish I could do this, but unfortunately i have The GIMP...which is a free photoshop-ish clone... I can't seem to get any of this to work out...and it's kinda bugging me.

Would be great is somehow it could be effectively translated for Gimp, PSP, Dogwaffle, etc. AS

Aye, it is sightly OT, but none of these effects have anything to do with Bryce. Still, they can all be comositied INTO Bryce, for use with animation or in conjunction with other, Brycean techniques. There's nothing shameful in postwork, it's all about the finished project... (how does one actually FINISH a project, though?!?!)

100% Bryce. Sorry for going on topic. ;-)

VERY nice...freaking perfect! AS

Attached Link: http://lbzgraphics.com/dblworld-2.jpg

Nice Bryce work PJF. In addition to Lunar Cell, FP has a couple of other filters Solar Cell and Glitterato. I used them on this image done in PSP 6.0 Was done way before I started fiddling with Bryce.

~;-)

LB

http://lbzgraphics.com/dblworld-2.jpg

Also 100% Bryce, not quite as flashy as the others, but easily animatable. I'm going to use it for ascene one day, it's all in my head but alas, my modeling abilities aren't quite up to par yet... I mean to put a space-dragon emerging from a space-warp, or perhaps I'll place my new Tranquil Hegemony ship in this scene. Cool thing about using procedurals, you can zoom in pretty far without TOO much loss of detail, although I'm certain Mojo is better overall for such things... Alas! This has been a great thread, AS! Merge any of these techniques and you get a totally different kind of starfield than we've all been previously using. Good stuff!