Original Post
Im trying to think of the best way to render the Milky Way that will allow the user the ability to rotate and zoom. The important thing is that the render looks great. I wanted to go ahead and post my thoughts to see if you guys think this will work or if I should look at something else. I am going to make a 3d model of the spiral arm clouds, probably a multilayer model. Cover that with some alpha textures that will probably be procedural from color brushes. Then overlay that galaxy model with locked particles to highlight bright stars and clusters. My ultimate goal is to create a galaxy simulation with minimal transition breaks while zooming down to planet scale. I like this picture. Something like that should not be so hard with some simple sprites and particles in a procedural pattern. But im afraid its going to look like crap when the user rotates around. [Edited by - Eber Kain on October 20, 2005 1:42:32 AM]