Bytescapes

a gallery of computer-generated images

The Lobster Nebula

Comments

A quick (?) scene thrown together to test out some techniques for making space scenes. The nebulae are made from stretched spheres to which cloud textures have been applied and then progressively tweaked to get the right effect.

In hindsight, this could probably be improved by making some of the nebulae less 'dense'; the planet in the foreground works reasonably well, but some of the rest doesn't look too good. The scene was rendered originally using Bryce 2.1; loading it into later versions of Bryce produces quite different and rather inferior results, due to changes in the rendering engine between versions.

A Lobster Nebula is, of course, inherently more interesting and amusing than a Crab Nebula. Tastes better with melted butter as well.

Note: I re-rendered this scene at a higher resolution so that I could include it on the new version of my website, and the stars became much too prominent, spoiling the look of the image. I was able to reduce the effect slightly by applying a Gaussian blur to the image, but only at the cost of softening the detail in other areas. Because of changes in hardware and supporting software, it'll probably never be possible to reproduce this scene exactly as it looked originally.

Applications

KPT Bryce 2.1
Metatools