How to do space scenes?

computersandmore · September 2015

Coming from 3ds Max, where there was a simple plugin that allowed you to generate a starfield, how do you do it in Daz? I like the renderer better in Daz (3Delight), so I'd like to start using it for all of my spaceship animations.

sriesch · September 2015

You can purchase (or find a free) skydome with stars on it, or you can just use an image as a 2D backdrop if you don't have anything reflective in the scene, or your reflective objects have some fake starfield reflection built in already.

computersandmore · September 2015

background image will not work, during animations the camera pans around and the stars need to change.

in Max you can just make a big sphere, apply a high-res starfield to it, and set it to self-illuminate. so far I've found no way to make a material emit light in Daz so that's why I have no idea on how to do it.

sriesch · September 2015

FYI, if using the 3Delight render engine, here's how to make a surface emit light:

    UberAreaLight:
   To make a surface emit light, select the surface, then select "!UberAreaLight Base.dsa". Then, in the Surfaces pane:
   To see the light source itself, set "Ambient Active" to On, and set the Ambient color, and apply an image to the Ambient Color if you want the light to have surface features.
   To change the color of the light emitted, set Color .
   Change the Intensity slider up to make it brighter; note some lights may need to be dramatically brighter to be seen, work with powers of 10 to start with. Opacity can also be used at the same time.
   To fix any graininess, especially in shadows: increase the samples parameter (at the cost of greatly increased render time). The value varies greatly depending on the light. I have seen 32 work for some lights, 1024 was needed for one.
   TODO Falloff Active was somehow set to Off, although my notes indicate it defaults to on. see what happens on a fresh installation, do I need to adjust it to "on" the first time?

Oso3D · September 2015

In my experience, I would treat illumination separately from starfield, because regular starlight just doesn't make a lot of light. Using UberAreaLight, you end up with incredibly dim scenes that you have to crank up.

Easier to make it an ambient skydome and then create some sort of even background illumination (like 2 or 3 distant lights with soft shadows).

computersandmore · September 2015

I'm afraid that doesn't mean much to me...I don't know what an "ambient skydome" is and it sounds like I'd have to add seperate lights to light it up which only adds to render time, which is what I'm trying to avoid by using 3DL.

Is there no way to simply wrap a starfield map onto the inside of a sphere and have it emit light (and still use my regular lighting setups)?

Or a plugin to simply generate a background that will smear with motion blur as the camera pans?? this is super easy in 3ds Max...but the renderer is terrible, unless I use Mental Ray but then an animation takes weeks to render just a few seconds. I really like the 3DL renderer, but without a way to easily and quickly (for repeated scenes) make a space background it's not going to do much good.

Oso3D · September 2015

Meshlights are very slow in 3DL, comparitively. Setting up 2-3 distant lights is very easy, and very fast.

Basically, create two distant lights. Set them to have, oh, raytraced shadows, shadow softness 80% or so. Rotate one 180 degrees, so it's lit on both sides. Make a big sphere with a starfield in the ambient channel, make sure the sphere doesn't cast shadows, and there you go.

Or you can make the sphere a meshlight, but, again, my experience is that trying to do that is incredibly slow and frustrating.

evilproducer · September 2015

Anything you do to get an image that emits light is going to take forever to render. I'm thinking you mean looks as if it is illuminated?

I don't use Studio, I use Carrara, another DAZ 3D owned software title. In Carrara, I have a scene option to add a background image to the scene that spherically wraps 360 degrees around the scene's "universe." It doesn't have to emit light, but it can act as an IBL if you enable the Skylight option in the render settings. Personally, I don't use it that way for a star field for the very reasons timmins mentioned above. The thing is though, that even though it is not emitting light in my scene, the stars in the background image look as if they are self illuminated and even reflect in reflective objects.

Here's a couple youtube videos of mine that use a spherical star field image:

Not to plug Carrara more, but.... There's also the ability to replicate lights with light effects on spheres. There's a great product called Starry Skies by a Published Artist here named Dartanbeck, who's also a great guy in person, that uses this method in a very sophisticated way.

http://www.daz3d.com/starry-sky-for-carrara

computersandmore · September 2015

yeah I don't need it to "light" the scene, just look like stars.

CypherFOX · September 2015

Greetings,

Something like this or this later on in the thread? There's a thread on 'worldballs' which are probably relevant to the other two links, also.

-- Morgan

cosmo71 · September 2015

It depends on how detailed and accurate your starfield should be and for what you need it. AM´s ultimo paradiso and ultimo paradiso expansion inlcudes huge spheres and texturemaps (transperency maps) that also includes a far sun and a far moon and also stars. If you for example click on "clouds - add cover" a huge sphere with clouds will show up, than you can change the transperency map from clouds to stars and you have a 360° starfield that is really huge (for me) choose environment and and select black color and you have a spave environment. The stars will move if you move the camera or you rotate the sphere and the stars will move. Have used this for some space renders I have done :) here are examples.

But there are also really good space products at the store. Have the solarsystem by Flipmode and it has also a huge (really huge) 360° space environment

cosmo71 · September 2015

here is another one for which I have used Flipmodes Earth, Moon and Space environment

Oso3D · September 2015

Starfield is some random one I got off the internet (I think it comes from NASA), put in base color and ambient channel, then two distant lights at 20 and 200 degrees X, 80% shadow softness.

I changed the windows to be reflective, but otherwise didn't do anything with the ship.

nDelphi · September 2015

For 3Delight you can get a lot of ideas from the http://www.daz3d.com/3d-space-battle-master

For iRay he has a package at Rendo, the "DAZ Studio Iray Deep Space". I think it is worth the $20 that it is discounted at and not the regular price.

Also, I warn you, his teaching technique is rough. It is not for everyone.

computersandmore · September 2015

Apparently I had a skybox from some other package. I loaded that and replaced the cloud/horizon map with a high-res NASA starmap. going to look at some of the other stuff you guys posted too though. thanks.