Ten Step Guide to Galaxies

Here is my 10 step guide to model my galaxy model, since I got several private posts how it was done I will sent it to the list. I'm not used to write these kind of technical tutorials, certainly not in English, so I hope it's clear enough...

1. make a cross section of a UFO kind of disk. Lathe this into a round object, so you have a nice high center.

2. Cut the bottem half of the disk, select the resulting flat bottom polygon if you used a boolean for that. ----------------- / \ ---------/ \------------- / \

This prevents the problems that are visible when you use transparent object that must look as if they are gas like objects.In the final animation you must constantely keep a look from above the object preventing that you look inside the galaxy. Save this object as galaxy.

3. Do a random prick with a lot of additional points on this object and kill poly's. Some jitter clears the straight lines. Perform point2polys and save this as stars1. Rotate the object and save as stars2.

4. In Photoshop open a new image wich if pretty large in size ie, 2000*2000, greyscale. Make some clouds, using a large image results in smaller clouds wich gives a better end result. Use twirl to get those arms. Using a large air brush, paint the center black, so in the final image this area won't have transparency at all.Resample the image in somthing more memory friendly, like 400*400.

5. On a new layer, use the circel select tool to select an area that is a bit smaller than the arms. Invert the selection, and use fill to make the outside of the image white. Use gausian blur to fade the sharp edge. Save this image as GalaxyTR.tga. This will be your transparency map.

6.Turn the image from a greyscale to a RGB color, then invert it, and use the variations to add some color. I used blue about 4 times. Save this image as GalaxyCLR. This will be your color map.

7. In LW load all your object and parent them to a Null for easy movement. Load both youre images and use them on the right surface parameters (color and transparency). Make your star and galaxy object all 100 luminosity and 0 diffuse. I used the transparency map as well on the star objects. For the color I chose a nice blue.

8. I used a dispalcement map on the galaxy object, just a small one to break things up a little. For the star objects, I gave one a smaal and the other a medium particle size (objects menu).

9. Place two 20% flares close to another to get those "clusters" inside the galaxy. I've got a couple of those in the galaxy.

10. Use your normal 3 time's random stars trick with different particle size's for the background, some additional flares with particles to spice up the background and you should be done in an hour or so!

I'm not a fan off the glow effect, mostly because it's **** with fields. I also experimented with surffuzz on the stars, I didn't liked it but...

Hmmm, I hope this was usefull to at least one person. Writing this down was harder then modeling that galaxy!

Jeroen Kloppenburg