13.4. Stars

Stars are randomly placed halo-like objects which appear in the background. The Stars settings are on the right-hand side of the Mist Stars Physics Panel (Figure 13-8).

When creating stars, you need to understand a few important concepts:

StarDist: is the average distance between stars. Stars are intrinsically a 3D feature, they are placed in space, not on the image!

MinDist: Is the minimum distance from the camera at which stars are placed. This should be greater than the distance from the camera to the furthest object in your scene, unless you want to risk having stars in front of your objects.

The Size: NumButton defines the actual size of the star halo. It is better to keep it much smaller than the proposed default, to keep the material smaller than pixel-size and have pin-point stars. Much more realistic.

The Colnoise: NumButton adds a random hue to the otherwise plain white stars. It is usually a good idea to add a little ColNoise.

Figure 13-9 shows the same misty image of Figure 13-7 but with stars added. The Stars settings used for the image are shown in Figure 13-10.