“My God, it’s full of stars!”

Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is…

I have been trying to create a really good “local space” for my CG space scenes for a while.  When I started with Lightwave I used the stock star models, but they were not very realistic.  Eventually I found and used the techniques in Kier Darby’s Better Space tutorials.   I used that for along time, but I never was 100% happy with the results.  So I set out to find the tutorials again and I did (thank you Taranis and the Internet Wayback Machine).   Still having redone my local space I wasn’t happy.  So I found all the tutorials I could and mostly all the techniques were  the same, but different.   Little variations.

So doing my own things and bits from each I think I’m getting a pretty good looking “local space”.    I need to paint some new nebulas, but more on that at another time.