WOW very cool Mike!

[show off! lol] Great image Mike, how long did it take to do? and how long to render?

Thanks! Didn't take particularly long to set it up, really. I set up a basic curve of about 4-5 spheres and applied the materials to it, then copied/pasted several times, each time positioning them along a spiral. From time to time I had to adjust individual spheres in groups to keep the spiral going evenly. Then when I had it, I grouped all the groups together, flattened and stretched that group some. Then I made copies of the one spiral and made them smaller or larger to suit and to fit. Then I applied changed the colors on the new groups. The central "star" is a lens flare point light surrounded by 3 speres with a yellowish volume smoke material, rather thin, as opposed to the spiral mats which are fairly thick. Then I rendered it once with multi-colors in Final, and saved that. Then I rendered it again in Final with no anti-aliasing, after changing all the spiral mats to pure white, and then blended the two versions in Painter 6. Each render took about 35 minutes.

Wow what a breathtaking idea! ;-) Bernie

Hey that looks real, you did a nice job, a 150 spheres really? Sharen

149 spheres for the spirals, and 3 spheres surrounding the "sun". :)

Err...not the sun, the central core star, at a mass of around 4 billion solar masses which was doing the supernova thing. Chances are that it became a black hole. :)

Well, I don't know much about galaxies and stars, but the pic looks very cool :) Elaine

That's really cool. Thanks for telling us how you did that too!

Mike, That is so neat! That volumetric smoke effect is great. John

Hey, that's a pretty cool image there... :) thanks for the tips...