Can you create  deep space background in Bryce 5? I know how to do it in 3DS Max easy but I haven`t figured out how to do it in Bryce yet. I need to make a deep space scene. No terrain or sky... Any suggestions?

Thanks again!

-WF

I am not sure how well you know Bryce so I will assume nothing and do this step by step.

Open bryce. Select the ground terrain and press the delete key.

Click the right facing arrow next to SKY AND FOG. Slide down to the last row of preset skies. On the left hand side is one called Starfield. Select it and click the tick.

Click SKY AND FOG. This opens the atmospherics options. On the right hand side is down facing arrow. Click it. Select the SKY LAB option.

In the Sky Lab click SUN AND MOON if it is not already selected. Select CELESTIAL and  STARS. Turn EVERYTHING else off and click the tick.

Hit render and you will have a basic starfield.

By playing around with the options you should get something you like.

I hope this helps.

I have a couple of space scenes in my gallery. In both cases I made a star backdrop in PS and applied it to a 2D square which I positioned and scaled to fill the scene. If you try this, you will probably want to turn off recieve,cast, and self shadows on your background pic. This can work well in a static pic, or even in an animation. I recommend deleting the ground plain. You can also use the starry background sky from Bryce's sky presets, but IMO the stars are not as realistic. Of course, a third way would be to do it in postwork using PS. Orbital wrote a good tutorial about doing just that.

WOW!That was EXACTLY what I was looking for! Thanks a lot!

I would go with Danamo's way of doing things, the bryce star field is pretty lame

If you guys mark "Custom" under the "Celestial" section in Sky Lab and play with the sphere you get more variations in star brightness.

@Wfire3-Happy to help.

also, if you turn down the intensity of the stars, but turn up the number of stars, you can get sort of a 'deep space' effect. There's some programs out there that can do sky pics; Universe (diard software), and Celestia, to name a couple. I cheat like a bandit and use Mojoworld..;) (only I would get a landscaping program just for the skies..one of those 'freebie' offerings from 3d World [I think]..;)

Cheating like a bandit is a carefully developed skill in the 3D world.:thumbupboth:

would u mind to show how u do it with 3dsmax?

I tend to use volumetric shaders to simulate nebula and other spece phenomenon. Ther ei salso a star texture taht can work soemtimes given the right setup and ther eis the basic starfeild which if you play with it will work out fine too. Bryce has really lame presets but is very deep in teh editing if you have the time and the will it can take you places.

Bryce is okay but it does things like put stars in front of the moon.  You can get maps from nasa for the moon and planets. Put them on spheres and vola, planets!

http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/

Get  texture, bump, clouds, nightime lights, moon images, more from this site.

http://planetpixelemporium.com/planets.html

Universe image creator lets you paint stars, nebulas, and more. Great for painting backgrounds or postworking stars on finished bryce  renders.

http://www.diardsoftware.com/

Attached Link: http://gallery.artofgregmartin.com/tuts_arts/making_a_star_field.html

Agree w/orbital , Greg Martin tutorial is probably the best I've seen.

Universe image Creator is a Superb tool!

I made this background one in a few minutes using the 2D plane method mentioned above.  I used a screen capture to get the image from the astronomy program and turned the atmosphere off.

I've had pretty good success in using the 2D backgrounds for space animations. I'll often make several layers(each on its own 2D pic, each with its own alpha map. I'll make the stars on the "foreground"  layer bigger, and that layer moves faster, and each successive map has smaller and smaller stars which move a bit slower the farther away they are from the "camera". I'll put the nebulas and galaxys on the back layer because they are the farthest away from the camera. This can give a very satisfying traveling "star matte" behind spaceships.

I make my stars out of spheres within Bryce and give them a sun texture and then change 5 or 6 of them to be Red Giants or white dwarves. Then I do a multi-replicate and depending onwhat I am doing in my scene set the amount to 999 then with the same selection choose to do the replicate again at 999. This will give you around 999 +5 or 6 x 999 or 998001 stars which is plenty for you local clusters for galaxies repeat the process 5 times as each time is squared.

Now let's move on to making a cluster or a galaxy!

Then once you have all of your stars you need to do the 3D disperse. You can choose to do the size as well but I find this to be a little bit of a waste of time, because if your computer as not locked up or fried by now you must not know I am joking...

There are some wonderful examples of how to do this above my post hehe.

Attached Link: Solarvoyager.com

In max all you can do is either put a starfield as the environment background or on a plane (multiple planes?). You still need to create the starfield in the first place, you can get a vaguely star like procedural using composites / blends of cellular and speckle maps, but it's more hassle then painting one in the gimp or photoshop.....(check out that greg martin tut or take a trip to solarvoyager.com)

Thanx, but I was more kinda hoping for particlesystem driven nebula's and galaxies and stuff like that The 2d stuff i got under control

particle system galaxies???? how fast did you say that new machine was going to be? :)

2 dualcore opterons with 4gb's of ram and a QuadroFX3400 vidcard

(btw, thought of multilayer rendering and post compositing yet?  )

I love the concepts of "multilayer rendering and post compositing" Ray, but I'll have to put some of that off until I can upgrade my machine to the kind of spec some of you guys have mentioned. It'll happen.

I've been doing mutlilayer rendering since i bought my now expired 300mhz AMD K6II that would be like 7 years ago or such?

It's not that hard on your computer. Actually the whole idea behind it is to split things up so you can make easy changes in photoshop and such without needing to re-render your entire 3d scene. Either that or splitting up huge scenes into bite-size chunks (which tends to be way more efficient in terms of total rendertime).

You should give it a shot :)

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2659299

Thanks Ray & Gog.