Digital Art Zone

Hello.

I need to make in Studio 3 some animations with galaxy flights. I need a script language code, that can place many random points in space, and then attache to each point a texture, so when rendered instead of points to appear galaxies. Then I’ll fly the camera through space and create my animations. Can this be done with Studio ?

Not literally, though you could create a series of plane primtives for your galaxy images and distribute those at random.

But if I create some primitives with pictures on them, then the galaxies would not look 3d. Can’t I somehow put the galaxy pictures in Studio without primitives ?

Unhelpful anecdote:  Astronomy professor wants to see if anyone in his class is paying attention.  He puts up a slide of a galaxy, appearing as a round disk.  “Here’s the galaxy X324.”  He then puts up another slide of a galaxy viewed at a more oblique angle.  “Here’s the same galaxy, photographed from a different angle.”  Nobody in the class saw any problem here.

You’d need some kind of 3D model to do that, I think. it might, in principle, be possible to do something with a custom shader but that would be a lot of work and would, I fear, be as slow as working with a simple 3D galaxy model.

use 3d objects with textures
maybe try to model some in Hexagon if you are real keen!
can do all sorts of spirally things (don’t ask ME how though, dunno, I use Carrara, I can do them there)
can add glow, opacity maps etc
or just look on sharecg etc for shapes

I have tried to make the galaxies with primitive planes, it works fine as long as the camera is not getting to close to any galaxy, because then it becomes obvious that the galaxies are not 3d but just 2d pictures. Can’t I somehow turn the pictures into sprites or quads, or at least the pictures to face the camera always ?

Look at this animation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08LBltePDZw

It was made in blender, the galaxies are just some textures that the author has turned into quads (or so he says on his blog: http://miguelaragon.wordpress.com).

And the second problem I’m facing: how do I randomly create thousands of primitive planes distributed randomly in 3d space ? I can’t simply place every plane manually, I need to use some kind of script. Can this be done ?

not in Daz studio.
You can using relicators in Carrara,
infact you could do what you originally wanted to do in Carrara, that is, replicate induvidual stars.
possibly Bryce could do something simillar with instancing
(I do not use Bryce)
download it while it is free and ask on the Bryce forum perhaps.

I have both, Carrara and Bryce…and Hexagon.

So I could obtain everything I want in Carrara ?

A short list of what I need:

1. Pictures of galaxies turned into some kind of 3D objects (I already have about 100 high quality HD textures with alpha channel made from astonomical photos), or at least to give the false impression of 3D objects (like a sprite, or a quad, or a 2D picture with a 3d halo, or the pictures to always point at the camera.)

2. Adding some light effect to the textures, like a 3d diffuse halo or something.

3. Placing randomly thousands of objects in 3D space via a script or something.

replicators randomly place virtual instances of objects in grid, ball or arc patterns or on surfaces
in Carrara drag the replicator icon in to your scene and in the spanner room for it add the objects you want to replicate
you have lots of parameters to play with
ask on the Carrara forum
very friendly bunch there
if I had known you had Carrara I would not have suggested anything else!!!!
in Carrara it is just too easy!!
there are also particle emitters and stuff.
once you go Carrara, you NEVER LOOK BACK!  LOL!
PhilW has a great galaxy scene http://www.sharecg.com/v/40215/gallery/5/3D-Model/Galaxies-Flythrough

Ok, thank you for your kind answers. I’ll open a new post in the Carrara forum.

You’ll need some serious hardware if you’re going to create literally thousands of objects in a 3D modeling program. Especially if you’re using HD textures. Especially especially if you want to do animation. Dozens of objects are ok; hundreds would be the limit but thousands is an interesting concept.

If you play computer games you’ll notice how good those graphics are these days but those guys are very smart at working out where to take shortcuts (for performance), that don’t impact the way we see the picture.

You might want to find an image that looks like what you want, and add that to a skydome (see here http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/8284/). This can be an HD image and you could prepare it beforehand in GIMP or Photoshop. If you want to randomize, you could provide say 4 different images, and each image you could rotate and flip for a total of different 64 different possibilities.

Or you could consider buying a space pack - there’s one called HFS Space System at rendo.