Been looking at a program called Stellarium.  It's really cool and acurate, but it's for astronomy and as far as I know can't be exported to Vue.

So I'm wondering if Vue currently has any plans to implement accurate stars into their V7 product.  One where the user could specify where they are using geocords or some other method, then be able to rotate the camera and get an accurate view of the stars they'd realistically see at that moment at that location.

Any thoughts?

Not that I know of, but maybe you can try to take a screenshot of the portion of sky you want directly from Stellarium, and then apply that screenshot to an alpha plane on a black background into your Vue scene.

One thing about 3d rendering software in general...rendering stars is a pain! What you will find is that faint stars are usually wiped out during the AA routine...usually because the stars are no more than a pixel wide and actually use different colours to give the impression of brightness. If you start to use too many pixels to make up a star they start to look like a fuzzy blob like the ones in Vue.
Just takes a hell of a lot of tweaking to get right...spent a great deal of time just trying to get a decent and accurate starfield to render on a ESA project!
I would certainly go with Agiels suggestion and tweak it in PS (contrast, selection etc, etc) untill it looks good in the render.

Ok, just used Stellarium to take a screen grab and then applied to a billboard and rendered in Vue Infinite.
As suspected, the fainter stars are aliased and somewhat whiped out, but not too bad....I think that with a bit of contrast it could make a great starfield, but obviously you are restricted by your screen size.
The image I have included below was rendered in Vue and is facing towards the region of Sagittarius and the original screen grab was at a resolution of 1920x1200...

Could you possibly stitch together something like this and convert it to HDRI?

Certainly be able to stitch it together, although I don't think HDRI would be of any benefit, with the sky being mainly black, but of course it would be good as a reflection layer.

I don't know how accurate it is but a quick search found:

http://ozviz.wasp.uwa.edu.au/~pbourke/modelling_rendering/starfield/

I've tried it as a hdri image and it seems to give a reasonable sky.

Just to be completely different, you could take a photo of the sky and put it in as a billboard or alpha plane. I know it can be hard to get stars to show up in a photograph but migth be worth a try... and if it works it'll definitly give you the best realism ; )

How cna you properly spherize a rectangular texture though?
I recall Flaming Pear and RIchard Rosenman having some such plugins but not sure if they'd actually make a spherical wrapping FROM a rectangular??

:)

I would argue that  you don't always need a spherical map for an image. If your creating stills (which most people do with Vue), you would only need a rectangular map. One thing with Stellarium, is that you can take screen shots of different parts of the sky, then stitch them together and use something such as the Flaming Pear plugin.

Photo's of the night sky, is another alternative, especially if you would want to incorporate star trails (as most people don't  have a tripod with motorised tracking). Apart from being able to track rotation, light polution is another issue if you want to use a map for a "space" render.

Wow, excellent discussion.  I really like the screen grab/render from Stellarium.  That's really a cool program.  Maybe just mapping that onto a big polygon in the back of the scene would be the way to go, until Vue incorporates this ability into Vue.

Thanks everyone!

AOW

I just bought Starry Night Pro Plus 6 http://www.starrynightstore.com/17235.html and this is an awesome piece of sowtware to view the stars, planets, moons, nebula, etc... and it lets you export pics and quicktime movies. Besides Stellarium you can also try another great free app Celestia http://www.shatters.net/celestia/ and check out the extra's for this free app at http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/ This will give you some great looking starfields in Vue !!