*voice echoes up from the depths of Silverblade's Mad Material Mayhem Workshop*

I recalled Niandji had written a tutorial on making Nebulas (ah, the joys of a swiss cheese cranial RAM :p)...up to now I've been using a technique for making nebulas that Monsoon created
bows to Monsoon :)

But, it's is far from perfect, in some regards...many real nebula have "filaments" and are just awesome pieces of celestial gossamer.
Long while back, I saved Niandji's tutorial but it didn't seem to work....

Works WONDERFULLY now, probably 'cause I have half a clue on how to actual do this stuff and didn't back then, :tt2:

Result: a Nebula that looks not bad...
*three cheers for Niandji ! * :thumbupboth:

So, I think mixing Monsoons "engineering" concept of layering nebula, plus Niandji's brainwave of using a terrain for the nebula = mucho fun!

Link to tutorial??

had to googlefu it for ya ;) [ http://market.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2261872](http://market.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2261872)

two layered nebuals, red one would need a better shape, edge can be seen on one side, but hey, not bad ;)
green nebula (stretched way big, scale altered to give patches across scene) looks gorgeous but this looks more raw.

1) Load a normal terrain (you may need to increase it's mesh scale for some materials I note, but 256x256 seems fine most of the time)  2) Simple material, apply color map of choice (look at real nebula pics, brilliant blues, greens, pinks oranges and blues abound) 3) Mapping mode has huge difference on how it  will look, adjust to taste, parametric, world/object modes etc. It's not a "real object", mess aorund to find what *looks* nice per scene. 4) Material Editor, add a fractal mode, voronoi etc, tweak to taste, link to colour map and transparency. 5) set transparency to Additive if wish. 6) Adjust diffuse, ambient and luminosity to taste, nebula are luminous but also have dark areas AND colours (some nebula have black dust clouds in front or inside, but most are light brilliant colours of ionized super heated gasses). 7) raise clip on terrain to cut off hard edges. 8) ALTERNATE: drive terrain with image map greyscale to get rid of edges and shape of choice (shape of terrain only affects general area of space affected, NOT the actual nebula's precise visible areas. You can of course, drive material/transparency as well with greyscale for precision, but making the fine details/structure of a nebula in greyscale, I think would require a 16 bit image and plenty of work). 9) Adjust Scale of material, has a major effect. 10) Rotate the terrain so it is flat to the camera.

This is really a game of tweaking to taste for the scene.

green nebula on it's own :)

Cool!  Will have to try this. 

Thanks much!

Thanks, that really beats the cloud formations I have been using and will mix well with both for me.

NPB :)

here's an alpha plane, 16 bit grey scale to drive colour & transparency

And final result :)
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1615236

One is terrain with procedural....other is alpha plane with a 16 bit greyscale driving colour & transparency :)

Looks great, but I have a related question. Is there a way to colorize Vue's monochromatic star field? Even in the night sky, with the naked eye, you can discern shades of color in some of the stars.

In the Atmo Editor under Effects, Stars, unckeck Colored stars.

Thanks. One of these days I'll get around to making stars. I'm still making my way through the manual.

Good luck with that.  I have read the manual at least a dozen times, and I think every page has a sticky note in it and am still scratching my head.

Vue could really do with a massive manual, with a RING binder backing, not the crappy way it is now (pages always fall out)
with more depth, info etc, I wouldn't mind paying for such a thing if done well :)