PArray with mesh spheres on a geosphere emitter 

This has 1000 for the sake of experimenting

emit at all vertices

select the geosphere not the parray and make a mesh snapshot

select at elements level all “not stars” and delete

These individual sphere/stars are now each their own element, so we can play with them using noise, rotating clones, whatever.

we probably want to instance geometry as each star here close-up looks like too many vertices

we will be able to next make clones, recolor them, remove parts of them, etc., the get variation. use layers to manage. wnat to end up with about 10 colors and about 18,000 stars.

we can alos use TWIST to modify star layers.

with NOISE scale turned down, we also can affect the stars shape as well as placement.

we can add FFD to twist the star positions

we can also add repeated noise modifier to soften the perimeters of the stars

This would be going back an making a new version at 5,000,000 meters ... 30 unit geosphere.

star size is 300,000 meters

this might be nice to instance as a single star ... made this 30,000 meters by mistake ...

this is the instanced geometry render, it looks the same ... size needed to be set to .1

could have maybe made this less segments ... like this ...

Why not just do this, use parray to randomize the spread of the stars ...

new seed to vary clones

SPEED to .1 and setting VARIATION and maybe DIVERGENCE soften the perimeters, adding the desired jitter

At the full size emitter of 5,000,000 meters we can get a nice soft perimeter with a high speed setting emitting over a single frame ...  a speed of 5,000,000.0 generic units.

next we can make copies with different seeds and colors. each time i make a new clone, and a new seed, then i apply a different  colored material:

here we have the 6 emitters each using size variations of 5- - 100%.

next is dealing with performance issues, maybe using something instead of instanced geometry, making mesh snapshots, etc. its really nice seeing the mesh preview on the screen. but i am not increasing the number of emitters now as it s slowing down.

back to the map ... increasing the high to .6 brings a nicer variation in the star briteness.

The nebula, that we will paint and map to a mesh.

make a giant geosphere just larger than the star fields

or a sphere ...

cut off most of it and invert normals

Get set up in Unwrap uvw ... you  might need to stitch an edge, scale, mirror, etc.

make interim texporter 512x512

BTW, i had the map grid tiled to 5x5, now i have to change tile back to 1x1

open in psd

crop

map will appear stretched again in max

paste grid into psd file

mapp will appears distorted in max of course

correct uvws ... scaling up ...

ok we are good to go. paint some junk.

turn off shadows, quad menu of the plane

make dummy at center of worldd

get your camera looking at the nebula

i also linked the nebula to a dummy at 0,0,0 in case i want to rotate it.

my camera view [stars of hidden btw] ... text is reading correctly ...

I am changing the camera lens to 20 mm to get in more of the nebula

Time to scale up our image. Lets try 1500 pixels wide.

renders with parrays unhidden will help us get a start ...

Go back to the materials and make colors liter if any stars appear dark over the nebula. remember to make the mats ADDITIVE in the extended rollout.

This demonstrates the use of ADDITIVE ... it only works if there is SOME transparency in the color ... even if it is only 1% ... here we see opacity set to 99 on the sphere on the left side. So make the star materials 99 opacity.

lets not forget self-illumination

self illum, 50

falloff in or out can also be a factor

before turning all colors to 99 opacity

after 99 opacity

we could use video post starfield to add a few more stars. the thing is then we would need an opacity channel as these would appear behind the nebula.

Get a much more vibrant look to the starfield by jumping up the britness of the brightest stars ... do this in the map output by increasing rgb output to 2.0.