"Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones."
-- John Wooden


Adding Stars and Galaxies
Purpose: To add great looking star backgrounds to existing scenes.

Programs Used: Bryce 2/3D, PhotoPaint 7/8, and Universe 1.5 (optional). This tutorial was written in reference to these programs; of course, countless other programs can be used.

It seems no matter what outdoor scene you may be working on, adding either a bold starry background or subtle handful of twinkling stars is a difficult task in Bryce.

In Bryce 2, this could be done by creating an infinite slab and applying a "star" texture or 2D picture to it. This generally worked well, but would often dramatically increase render time, interfere with the desired atmospheric colors, and get washed out and dulled in the antialiasing pass. Bryce 3D answered some requests for adding these effects, but my experiences with them has been disappointing and random.


Untouched Bryce Render 		To begin, you must have a rendered image (in a format of your choice); don't attempt putting in any stars during the render process. See the image to the left for my "Moonlight Walk" example of my initial image. You can create your own starfield, or use a great shareware program called Universe. I've used Universe quite a bit; it's easy, it's shareware, and most importantly: it looks fantastic. I'll assume you are using Universe - if not, get your starfield ready and skip this next step. Open Universe, and create a new document with the same *resolution* as your rendered image. Just select FILE, NEW and Universe will let you specify a resolution of your choice. Universe will only render at 72 DPI, but that doesn't matter: PhotoPaint, when pasting the Universe scene, will scale the document size so the Universe scene will match your Bryce Scene. As long as both resolutions are the same, everything will match perfectly.

Create a starfield in Universe as intense or as subtle as you desire. Use stars, nebula, vortexes, lens flares -- whatever you like - but, only work in the areas that will be visible in you scene (probably only to top portion of the Universe scene). For example, since the stars will only be applied to the top portion of my "Moonlight Walk" scene, I am going to only work in the top 30% or so of the Universe document. The next step, now that your starfield is finished, is to load both the Bryce render and Universe scene in PhotoPaint. Select the Universe Scene, and click on MASK, SELECT ALL. This will mask off the entire scene. Click EDIT, COPY. At this point, you can close your Universe scene as you won't need it anymore.


Masked Bryce Image 		Now You will need to mask the sections of your Bryce image where you want your stars to be. The image to the left shows my "Moonlight Walk" mask. Click on it for a larger image where the masking is a bit more obvious. You can make this mask by hand, or by using a Mask Render from within Bryce (and then loading the mask under the Mask pulldown menu). I prefer the former; mainly because you can (if you are proficient with masking) mask the scene much faster manually, and 2D images (often used in trees, complex models and other objects) will not render transparency (only as big boxes!). Using the Magic Wand masking tool, and then trimming it using the scissors or lasso masking tools makes short work of working around even the most complex images.

Remember, you don't need exactness when editing around trees and other complex objects. The stars are being blended with the background, so it is better, for example, to mask off a whole tree and just "open a few pockets" and mask where the obvious gaps are through the branches. Be sure the "+" is selected on the mask toolbar when cutting pockets where the stars will show through so you will be adding to the mask. It may be arduous, but will take 15 minutes at most! And if you aren't proficient with masking, take 20 minutes and do the tutorial in Corel on it!


Universe Image Copied into Mask 		Once the mask is done, click EDIT, PASTE, then select INTO SELECTION. Your star backdrop is now in copied into your Bryce Scene, but probably looks pretty bad! The image at the left shows "Moonlight Walk" after I copied the sky into it. We're almost finished - we just need to adjust the OBJECT BLEND, and we'll be all set.


PhotoPaint Object Roll-Up 		We want to retain the haze and sky dome from Bryce...no worries; click VIEW, ROLL-UPS, OBJECTS. The default setting should have Object Editing Mode in "Multi" (if not, click it). The image to the left shows what the Object Roll-Up should look like, and where to click. Near the bottom of the objects window are 4 buttoms. Click on the second one from the left: CREATE OBJECT FROM MASK. This will highlight the masked section (the background should be locked) and enable the MERGE and OPACITY settings on the bottom of the roll-up window. In the MERGE setting, click IF LIGHTER. This should instantly blend the stars with the background, so your existing sky dome or haze colors stay. You can slide the opacity slider to taste!

To see the final image, surf to my gallery page.