I'm starting this thread to document and ofcourse to ask lots of questions as I go through the journey of trying to make a Music Video (Not commercial) for fun and also to learn how ot use Carrara.

The theme of the video is Retro and in particular related to the Commodore 64 and Amiga Computers and Demo Scene.

Here is a question to start with.  Is there a way to generate a Moving Star Field in Carrara?  I want to animate objects on the screen while a star field scrolls in the background.  The only way I can think of is to do it in Post Production in Adobe Premier or something overlaying the Carrara Video ontop of another video containing Star Field Generated in another program or something.

I would think that particles could work very well for this. Also the replicator would make it pretty easy to scatter a multitude of "star" objects, possibly lit with anything glows across a black or nebula background. DCG sells a plug-in for making starry backgrounds. Of course, the way you first mentioned would work well too, using backgrounds made in another program such as Universe Image Creator and PS. A lot of it depends on the POV of your shot and your "camera movement".

Hmmm, you've got me thinking. I haven't tried to do a deep space scene in Carrara yet, but there's a heck of a lot of great tools such as; volumetric clouds for nebulas and gas clouds, several kinds of flares for background star lights and spaceship engines. Maybe I'll try something too.;-)

There are a bunch of ways to do this. :) The easiest way is to use a plug in built just for this kind of assignement: StarBright from Digital Carvers Guild for star backgrounds (www.digitalcarversguild.com) Another way would be to generate a starfield in Photoshop or something similar and then map it to a very large sphere and rotat the sphere over time. There are a couple of other ways to to do it but these would be your best choices. Mark

Thanks for the great advice.  I'll look at them all and see what works.

I like Mark's idea of mapping a star field to a large sphere and putting my scene inside that sphere, its low tech and might do the trick.   I just have to be carefull how the starfield is mapped on that sphere since the scaling could potentially stretch the starfiled bitmap.

Thanks.  I will post some (wip) pictures when I get some done.

Attached Link: http://www.richardrosenman.com/software/downloads/

Regarding texture stretching in spherical mapping if you've got Photoshop click on the link, scroll down and look for the Spherical Mapping Corrector plug in. That ought to sort that out.

Thanks for the link Anastasis20. There are several useful PS plug-ins there.

Thanks for the Link I will try the cylindrical approach as well and see what results I get.

I just got back from a 4 day vacation in New York City.  I will get back to working on the video sometime this week, and should have screenshots for you to review.