The nebula is mulit-layerd.
I have one sphere textured with a bitmap I made using Lightwave 9 set to turbulence as a texture. I saved that image and then attached it to the sphere in Carrara.
The 2nd level of sphere is textured with a starfield (and one on the self illumination/glow & alpha map layers).
The 3rd level of sphere is the outer most sphere and it's textured with a starfield (and one on the self illumination/glow layer as well) but nothing on the alpha map layer - this gives me the 'dark' space needed.
Inside the sphere I have (the number depends on the shot) a few (usually at least 3) volumetric clouds with a light set to illuminate each one individually so I can contol the amount of light/colour on each.
Then I have my ships/space station 'floating' around inside the sphere.
All in all I would say I have probably about an hour of pre-rendering set up time for these shots.
I've mentioned it before but the reason I use Carrara is because it works so well with my workflow/train of thought that it's almost effortless for me.
And thank you for the compliments you guys.
It means alot to me as I know you're awesome modelers and I hope you'll like what I do with your meshes.
When it's finished the animation will run about 30 minutes.
I will need some people who can speak Klingon (audio files) if you know anybody who might be interested. All I need is the wav file and I can lip synch that to the 'actor' mesh for the scenes.
These are just my 'test' shots to see if I like the nebula and if I think the starship looks ok. So far I'm pretty happy with both and reading your comments suggests to me that I might be going in the right direction.
I'm really happy right now!
Thanks a million
Just to keep things from being confusing - when I say 'layer of sphere' I don't mean actual layers like in LWO but instead there are 3 different spheres inside of one another - each one just a wee bit smaller than the other. Plus the 2 starfield spheres are rotated at different angles so they don't look the same.
