Best Way to Make a Star dome?

Deke

Trying to make a sphere of stars so I can pan around inside as I animate some space ships.  I have been using the star dome from the Juice 3d solar system models...but in rendering in 4.8 and iray I get nothing but black.  Any way to create a good sphere with lots of distant stars.

fred9803

I suppose I'd use the tecture of an existing Iray sky dome, and use that texture map to bash some hi-res night sky images onto it. Granted, you'll have a problem getting the aspect ratio right or you'll get distortion. Google images has lots of large night sky images - be sure to use non-copyrighted ones.

Edit - or if you've got $15 you could buy this I suppose. https://www.hdri-hub.com/hdrishop/hdri/space/item/756-hdr-180-1-space-sky-and-stars

Herald of Fire

You can still use the Juice 3D star dome, but you will need to covert it to an emissive surface. If you use the emission preset from the default iray materials, you can plug the starfield texture map into the emission. It doesn't need to be particularly bright, as you aren't using it to illuminate the area, you're just making it more visible. In fact, by doing it in this way you can also get some good reflections of the stars in windows or metals.

Deke

Thanks. I did try to apply Iray Emissive to the Juice 3D dome but it came out a big wall of beige/copper color. What did I do wrong?

Herald of Fire

If you post the surface materials, we can take a look and see if we can help you out. One point of note, however, is you won't be able to have light sources outside the dome shining inwards. You will need to keep your light sources inside, since it can't penetrate the dome itself.

Fishtales

Herald of Fire said:

If you post the surface materials, we can take a look and see if we can help you out. One point of note, however, is you won't be able to have light sources outside the dome shining inwards. You will need to keep your light sources inside, since it can't penetrate the dome itself.

Yes it can.

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/63014/yet-another-iray-skydome-technique

I use Skydomes that let the Iray Dome lighting through and have also used Sun and Sky only.

Like this one using WorldbaseXtreme.

Click on image for full size

Or this one with cloud shadow from the dome.

Click on image for full size.

Deke

Doh!  forgot to add the image of the stars as the Iray Emission Color in the surfaces tab.  So that resulted in stars, however, they are rather wonky due to the odd shape of that particular box. I'll see if I can't apply that image to an actual sphere.