@TheBadger:
I think we shouldn't relate to much on real world scale. I'm not sure if we could see anything of the nebula even if we were right inside it. It's probably far too big. Not talking about the speed a spaceship needs to fly
through such kind of nebulae. Even with light speed it would most likely be a
very slow travel!
It's just an effect... By the way, I don't know if I you may have got me wrong regarding 3ds Max. I only created the starfield as an object in Max and exported it as .obj, imported it into TG and converted it to a .tgo. The render is pure TG.
@Dune:
Yes, size matters of course
Seriously, I don't know if I could change the scale settings of the clouds without changing the whole shapes, with which I'm very happy now. Maybe I'll check that out, when the animation is done. 2015 maybe...
The population and rock solution is a very clever idea. I first thought about using tiny little clouds when I started this thing, since someone had done this before. But I was too impatient to make hundreds of tests with some other cloud layers and chose to import this starfield object (which was made in less than a minute). I'm not that much of a purist, who says everything has to be done in TG. In my opinion it's the final result that counts.
Something else, I'd like to share the starfield object, but even with WinRar I can't get it any smaller than 900KB...
(Frame 24 has just started to render. Rendertime actually 46 hours!)