method for making stars for night scenes

[oysteroid]

I wanted to make a scene with moonlight and stars, and since Terragen 2 doesn't seem to have any way of generating stars directly, after some digging, I found a way to do it. I found an include file for POV-Ray that has the Bright Star Catalog and a macro for implementing stars as distant spheres in a POV-Ray scene. That file is here:

http://news.povray.org/povray.binaries.scene-files/thread/%3C4a02be66@news.povray.org%3E/

I then created a POV-Ray script that utilizes this include file and renders the scene with a spherical camera with 360 degrees right ascension and a full 180 degree range of declination.

#declare LimMag = 6;
#declare fDec=15;
#declare fRA=75;

#macro StarMapStar(vPosition, fMag)
   #if (fMag < LimMag)
      #local vPos = vrotate(vPosition, <0, -fDec, -fRA>);
      #local c = ((LimMag+1)-fMag)/(LimMag+1);
      sphere
      {
         vPos * 10000, 8
         texture{pigment{colour rgb<c, c ,c>}finish{ambient 1 diffuse 0}}
      }
   #end
#end

#include "starmap.inc"

camera {
 spherical
 location <0,0,0>      
 look_at  <0,0,1>      
 angle 360            
       180            
}

I rendered this with a resolution of 12,000 x 6,000 pixels. Then, in my Terragen scene, in the background node, in the surface shader tab, I selected default shader and in the color tab of that node, I added this image file to the color image and luminosity sections, cranking up the luminosity a bit. And in the images tab, I set the image projection to spherical.

The reason for the very high resolution of the stars image is to yield fairly tight stars in high resolution renders, especially since any typical render covers only a small portion of the sphere of view.

Anyway, you might tweak the POV script a bit to meet your needs. I actually took the resulting file into Photoshop and did a levels adjustment on it to darken the stars in the middle range since I wanted only a few stars in a moonlit sky.

And there is probably a way to utilize data from larger star catalogs.

I ended up rendering six views of the moonlit scene, each with a ninety-degree field of view, each at 2000x2000 pixels. I saved them as EXR files to get HDR data. I then converted them to HDR in Photoshop, took those files to Cube2Cross to stitch them into a cross shape. I took that result to HDRShop and converted it to an angular map measuring 6000x6000 pixels. And then I used that angular map as the background in Blender and rendered in YafaRay, using it as an HDR image based light source. It worked pretty well!

Here is a test result. I didn't go to too much trouble with the Terragen scene at this point, as I just wanted to test the concept. And the stars still need some tweaking. Also, the figure was posed in DAZ Studio 3 and exported to Blender, where the sphere was added that was used as a meshlight in YafaRay. I added the glow on the sphere in Photoshop.

http://i118.photobucket.com/albums/o115/memetrader/floating.jpg


If anyone has any suggestions about a more realistic moonlit night scene, I would appreciate them. I am pretty new to Terragen at this point.

[TheBlackHole]

Try dandelO's Procedural Night Sky or moodflow's Starfield Background with space dust.
dandelO's: http://sites.google.com/site/rockyknuckles/dandelo'spubliclibrary
moodflow's: http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=4391.msg46100

[dandelO]

* Mine doesn't work. There's a glaring fundamental flaw that I can't believe I took for granted. Use it, certainly, but I'm fixing this at the moment so it actually does what I say it does.

[TheBlackHole]

What is that error? I'm using a modified version of it in my default scene. I did decrease the saturation of the star colors, though. It unfortunately made the stars easily visible in daylight! I might replace it with moodflow's starfield, or maybe increase the color saturation in the modified version of yours.