Spherical Star Fields in Bryce 4
The usual method for creating star fields in Bryce is to use an infinite 2D plane. To me, they tend to look a little to too flat (especially for "pure" space scenes) and often times Bryce would anti-alias the stars right out of exsitance. As an alterantive, try using multiple, large spheres. The image above shows the effect with 2 spheres and the Color Stars texture download below. It certainly survives anti-aliasing well and compared to a 2D plane seems to have better depth (but of course that could just be me!). PC users please note that these images use Mac Gamma, so they will appear somewhat darker - this should not effect the texture download when loaded into Bryce PC.
The procedure is really simple. First download the Bryce textures and load them into Bryce (go here if you don't know how). Next create a sphere centered on the camera and select the Objects>>Attributes menu item and enter 5000x2800x5000 in the size fields.
Now multi-replicate (Edit>>Multi-Replicate) the sphere once or twice with a scaling on all axes of 101%.
Making them this large leves plenty of room to add objects inside the sphere (notice how small the camera is in the wireframe!).
Using multiple spheres changes the density and the apperant brightness. The image below shows the effect of using 1, 2 and 3 spheres (with the Faint texture):
Download the Bryce 4 Star presets (.mat) in Zip format
Download the "Space" Bryce Sky preset (.bsk) in Zip format
Mac users - download the MacZip Expander
Here are the thumbnails of the 3 textures in the download:
Here's a simple image using the Color Stars plus 2 other large spheres for the purple "gas" cloud and 2 smaller spheres for a nebula effect. The wire frame follows.
