Reply To: Space Station Challenge 2021 WIP – Starlab P
Day 2: I added the pulsar in the middle of the station and gave it some materials. It was quite a buit of playing around to find something that I liked.
For the lighting, I used the same background as for the low poly rocket tutorial. The light of the pulsar comes from a point source inside of the pulsar. There is a texture on the pulsar and the light only comes out of certain regions. I achieved this using a mix node with the texture as factor. On one end there is another mix of colors. On the other end, there is a mix node between and emission material and a transparent material. The factor of this second group is controlled by ‘is camera light path’. So this means that the camera will see the emission, giving the bright spots. All the other objects will see the much brighter point source inside. In nodes this looks something like:
I also added some smoke animations like in the tutorial. So @adrian2301 , don’t worry, I am putting the tutorial to good use.
So, with cycles this is a single frame:
This is definitly missing some stars in the background.
I am also thinking of adding some volumetrics to give the lighting of the pulsar a bit more awsomeness, but that will depend on time (the difficult part is that due to the environment lighting, I will have to work with render layers or something to prevent the background from filling up the volumetrics, but that system has changed so much since 2.7 that I have to lear it all over again.)
The ‘story’ now also has a bit more filling. StarLab is a space station which acts as a laboratory. In this case it is StarLab P for Pulsar. Pulsars are small stars that died and were just not heavy enough to become a black hole. Pulsars are a form of neutron stars that emit very regular pulses of electromagnetic waves. I can only imagine that some advanced race could harvest that energy.