Hello.

I'm trying to render space animations and I'm having a problem with the starfield always "twinkling". It is more pronounced the smaller I make the stars (which, for realism's sake, has to be virtually pinpoints).

I've tried both mapping a starfield image to a sphere and using the built-in stars in a World. I get the same result with both techniques. I'm rendering 640x480 with .5 mblur. OSA level doesn't make a diff.

Do you have any ideas on how to "stabilize" the stars' movements? Would there be some rendering settings that could help out with this?

Thanks in advance.

Hi,

Hmm, you'd probably be better off asking this at the elysiun forums (www.elysiun.com) - they may have a work-around for you.

As for a technical explaination: The twinkling is a result of anti-aliasing - ie. the effect of the star moving between pixel boundaries.

Hope that helps!

aphex

Maybe try rendering your anim at two times the size and then
scale it down.

WAIT!!!!

It's not just the anti-aliasing...

The blender "camera" has settings related to start and end... meaning that it only shows what is between the two distances... This means that if your camera is moving during the animation... new stars will "wink" into existance because the "distance" of camera limits has changed... you are seeing stars come into being because the camera is moving... allowing it to see "more."

I have run into this problem a lot when I use the built in starfield generator...

My advice would be to either setup a mesh and use halos to create stars... or use transparencies with star backgrounds on a sphere mesh (create multiple spheres)...

SKPjason
Jason Saville

I've gotten some good results making an animated starfield using the Halo suggestion above. I use a few meshes with different color halos (white, yellow, red, blue) and various size halos. Also I added a cloudy texture to the "world", set to a very dark blue color -- sort of gives a suggestion of nebulae, etc.

I get a good starfield mesh by:
Create a cube
use "Fractal Subdivide" set to 100 a few times on the cube
Delete all faces and edges
Use "To Sphere" at 100% around the origin
Scale the new spherical mesh up to about the max limits (don't forget to set the range of your camera out to the max as well)
Apply a material and use "Halo"
Adjust the halo settings until it looks good.

Compares well to sci-fi television. Probably not useful for astronaut training.