Makin’ An Eclipse

Graham continues his space tutorial series, featuring the Orion Nebula

In this tutorial as part of my Makin’ Space series, I take a 2D image of the Orion nebula, (from the photo gallery of the European Southern Observatory – https://www.eso.org/public/usa/images/ ).

Firstly I bring it into Adobe Photoshop and use a combination of the Color Range selection tool, Content-Aware Fill and the Spot Healing brush to remove the stars. I also make a fake depth map, to use in Cinema 4D Lite’s Relief Generator.

The tutorial covers using C4D’s material editor and I show how to use the Duplicate and Randomise tools to make a 3D starfield – which is useful if you don’t have Mograph’s cloner (only available with full C4D).

Finally, I use After Effects to apply Bilateral and Compound Blurs to make the 3D object look more like a dust cloud by feathering the edges, but keeping the detail.

Note:
During the tutorial I use C4D’s visible light noise to create clouds. I think it’s a handy technique to know about, but I’ve since gone off the look it makes here.

Graham Quince
Halifax, UK

I mainly work in compositing, 3D modelling and programming, but nothing at a broadcast level. I’ve used the Adobe suite for 20 years.