Well, I was bored last night and did a bit of experimentation with my handy-dandy Bryce 4. Turned off the sky and the ground plane. Then turned off the sun. So what I end up with is the black cold void of space. Next I put a light here and a cloud sphere there, repeating as necessary and tweaking the material and light behavior controls as I went along. And it started looking like a Nebula of sorts. Here's the link to the resulting image: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=278461&Start=1&Artist=pauljs75&ByArtist=Yes I think the orangish glowing area on the upper right is the best part. It happened by accident and I'm still not sure what I did exactly. Regardless, I might try this again sometime. Also it seems that the picture looked better when I first did it. I'm not sure if it's the monitor gamma on different computers or the conversion to jpg, but the original appeared to have better range of luminosity. Comments please...

Wow. Impressive, a lot of energy going on there. I love the almost rolling wave effect on the left side. Makes me almost think of a massive explosion in space. Also, reminds me of the problem cloud from the first Star Trek movie, Vger, wasn't it? Beautiful work.

Cool!

Nice pic. I was messing with volumetrics last night too (ooh matron!) and I found that using basic shading instead of flat can produce some awesome effects without any real slowdown (I'm not sure if this is in B4 though). By the time I'd finished my scene looked like a supernova, so I deleted most of it, but it's good fun just experimenting and seeing what can be done.

Very nifty effect, and I like the orangy-thing in the upper right too. I can see where even more luminosity would make this picture even better, but what can you do? Thanks for sharing. Lin