Creating a galaxy

[Steve Roberts]

I smell render failure. 🙂

Seriously, you might want to fake it with a NASA galaxy shot. Mask it around the stars and feather the mask. Dupe the layer, make the dupes 3D layers, and separate them all a bit in Z-space. Leave the middle layer’s mask alone, but shrink (negative expand) the mask on each of the layers on either side of it, so the mask gets smaller as you go out.

It’s like making a sphere using circle planes: the middle one is biggest, with the others getting progressively smaller as you go out.

This way you can fly into a galaxy and pass through layers of stars. Add a few stars in-between and near camera path for effect.

Give it a go …

[Finalrenderfilms]

Or you could try to somehow use like a google earth type program but one that can zoom in from like galaxies or something, and using different zoom levels on the galaxy itself..Just a thought.

Mark
Final Render Films

[Darby Edelen]

You could find a way to make some cool swirly effects with the Time > Time Displacement effect, it takes a while to render, but can be useful for such effects:

All you really need is an image that you rotate in a pre-comp, and a radial gradient to control the Time Displacement effect. Giving it a sense of depth might be difficult, but you could use multiple copies (I recommend pre-rendering after you have your Time Displacement down) or a Displacement Map generated from the swirly.

One thing that I’ll mention if you go the Displacement Map route is that the ubiquitous white/black gradient used for this effect most of the time is not ideal in most situations. I posted on this recently, try searching the forum for ‘Normal Map’ if you need some ideas.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Matjusm]

That seems to be what I’m looking for but could you give me some specifics. What I did was that I created the core of the galaxy with fractal noise and used a mask to cut it into a star shape but I got a little confused with the Time Displacement part. I precomposed the rotating galaxy “source” and then created a radial gradient as a new solid layer and then set the Time Displacement filter to use the solid as its source but nothing happened. What am I doing wrong?

[Darby Edelen]

Time Displacement will look at the solid before the Radial Gradient is applied, you need to pre-comp the solid (Move all attributes) and then use the pre-comp as the source for the time displacement.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA