hello, was just wondering if anyone else out there did any space scenes with blender. the thing i was needeing help with is 1. are there any tut's out there for the space thing in blender? 2. can anyone help me to do the interstellar bodies like supernovas, nubula's, galaxies and so on. i got a decent grasp on making planets but still cant do rings although i have a sneaking suspicion that i might be able to do it by joining some curves....or maybey making a circle and then another insdie the first...well if anyuone could shed some light on this i would much appreciate it

Derrek

"still cant do rings although i have a sneaking suspicion that i might be able to do it by joining some curves....or maybey making a circle and then another insdie the first..."

What about using a donut? Maybe this could help?

For a lot of that I'd use particles.  The manual (http://www.blender3d.org/documentation/htmlI/c9291.html) has a pretty good reference for that.

For the rings, it depends on how realistic you want them.  I'd start with a circle, press e then escape so the vertices don't move anywhere, then press s to make the outside of the rings.

If you just want to see the rings from far away, you could just use a spherical ramp shader to create a ring texture.

Otherwise, you could create several rock objects, use W-->Subdivide Multi Fractal on your ring object that you created above, duplicate the ring object a couple times and rotate randomly and maybe scale a little for each copy, then use dupliverts with your rock objects and your ring objects so your rock objects are duplicated along the rings (http://www.blender3d.org/documentation/htmlI/x9867.html)

I suspect that's not clear enough, if you need more explanation just ask :)

And building on Halos suggestion you might try diving into the Array Modifier.

http://www.blendernation.com/2006/07/04/array-modifier-demo-video-and-blend/