How to stop star's blinking

[ned]

Modeling a solar system fly thru with a star field background. Made Star field in modeler with 100 stars in each magnitude category.

When camera moves the stars twinkle. I've tried medium antialiasing, field rendering, motion blur, and soft focus. Nothing works except soft focus stops twinkling on some of the dimmer stars.

Anyone figured out how to stop stars from twinkling?

[lardbros]

First question is... why would you want to stop them twinkling? I've just done a starfield built by hand and added a procedural texture to the differing stars so that they do twinkle.

Anyway, what you could do is mess with the stars size by going into the object properties in layout and altering the particle/line thickness in the edges tab. Try changing it by typing in values, NOT by choosing the drop down list of medium or whatever is there. Just up the values slightly. Another thing you could do is check to see if you actually have any textures that would cause them to alter in brightness.

If none of the above, then it's probably lightwaves antialiasing just not doing the job. Try altering the threshold for adaptive antialiasing (if it's being used), if not, then i don't really know... i guess if you're using lightwave 8.2 or 8.2.1 you could try out the extra rendering choices to see if that may work.

Good luck

[ned]

I don't want the stars to twinkle because stars only twinkle when you are inside an atmosphere. In space they don't blink.

I tried changing the edge size but that just makes them bigger and not realistic.

[lardbros]

Never knew stars didn't twinkle in space. Not sure how you could deal with it. A lot of software has this problem with tiny objects jittering, and even cameras have problems with highly patterned things and fences or similar things that cause moire patterns.

Hopefully someone who worked on Babylon 5 and used lightwave will come to your rescue. You could always try doubling the resolution and comp it later at half size, i'm sure that could do it. Probably not a great answer, but you'll be able to reduce the antialiasing levels aswell.

[Integrity]

I'll try...here are my best guesses...

Try turning off Dithering to see if it is interfering with the anti-aliasing. It may be adding too much of a random value thus making the AA judge inapproximate values.

If you are using particles/one-point polygons try using sprites instead. You may be able to have more control over their look this way.

Turn off AA and see if they render correctly. If they don't twinkle and don't stutter too much due to aliasing and pixelation, then Lightwave's anti-aliasing algorithm won't be able to do it nicely. In this situation enlarging their pixel size like lardbros said is probably the only solution.

It also may be the actual codec your using in the render settings; it might be compressing it too much that it get's rid of some detail.

I hope this helps.

[toby]

Why haven't you tried High or Extreme AA? Medium doesn't always cover everything.
Enhanced with adaptive turned off should help too.
Are you using Particle blur?

[starbase1]

I think the problem you have here is one that is very common with star fields - the fundamental problem is that you have a 1 pixel object moving across pixel boundaries.

Anti aliasing will not help much with this - but motion blur, converting them into short lines, can help a lot more.

I also managed to get reasonable results by using a giant collection of thousands of lens flares for stars!

But if you do this a lot, you might want to get a copy of Hyperstars - reasonabley priced, and does a geat job.

Nick

[adrian]

I managed to reduce the twinkling effect somewhat by using enhanced AA, plus motion blur. Anything less and the twinkle was too much...

Adrian.

[composermanII]

I too have had troubles with starfields. I know that it costs some money, but I would also would reccomend StarPro or Hyperstars. You can find them at: http://maasdigital.com and http://www.ficatech.com/ Using either one of these plug-ins should help get rid of that annoying flickering.

Good luck,

Troy

[starbase1]

Starpro always looked really nice to me - but $500 for a starfield plug in is an insane price. The cut down version won't even do wallpaper resolution.