Starscape

Starscape is a procedural starfield texture for Blender Cycles and Eevee! It's designed to be used with the world background, either by itself or mixed with a Sky Texture. It provides a quick way to add random stars to the background of any sci-fi shot. It's very quick to render in an empty scene too, so if you're rendering in another package you can quickly export a camera to Blender (via Alembic or similar) to generate a starfield background you can composite later on!

Note: starscape produces stars of random locations, brightness, and color. It does not accurately recreate any real world stars or constellations, and I cannot be responsible for astronomy pedants coming after you if you use it for an earthbound sky!

NOTE: Starscape requires Blender 3.4+!

Features

Simple and Modular
Starscape is just a node group with a color output. You can easily mix it in with any other world shading. No special python scripts, no addons, no panels, and no restrictions on what shaders it can work with. Add it to the built-in sky texture via a Mix node to add some atmosphere to your stars!


Customizable
You can adjust color strength, brightness, and star density with simple sliders!


Dots, Not Clouds
Starscape uses voronoi n-spheres to produce a random distribution of dots on the world background. Unlike traditional stars which work by isolating bright values in perlin noise, the stars produced by starscape are actually round rather than small squiggles!


Blackbody Colors
Per-star colors are randomly selected from a blackbody range, providing realistic star colors!


HDR Ready
A lot of star shaders have the stars all at a single brightness (usually RGB [1.0, 1.0, 1.0]). Starscape has a realistic brightness variation among different stars, so as you raise exposure more dim stars will "come out"! When used with HDR10/Dolby Vision displays, the brighter stars will properly "pop" like in a real astro-stacked photograph, and all of these features are preserved when baking Starscape to an HDRI or an OpenEXR skydome card! Want to add some diffraction spikes or bloom? No problem, the stars have real brightness and will trigger these highlight filters "for real"!


Asset-system Ready
Starscape is pre-marked as an Asset, so if you have a user assets folder already set up in Blender, you can just drag the starscape.blend file there and you're good to go!



Installation:

The included starscape.blend file contains the node group along with some setup examples. You can link/append the node group directly from the file, or you can copy the starscale.blend file to your local Blender assets directory if you have one. The node group is pre-marked as an asset and should simply appear in your asset library once the starscape.blend file is in your assets folder. It will appear in the "unassigned" section, assign it to your own catalog as you like.


Parameters:

• Scale - overall scale of the texture. The same as scaling with the mapping node, use this to control overall star size and to compensate for camera focal length
• Density - adjusts the number of stars without affecting scale. This control is rather sensitive, you can return to the default 0.5 value if things get out of hand
• Brightness - adjusts the relative intensity of the stars
• Color Strength - adjusts the mix factor for blackbody colors. Default is 1 for maximum blackbody coloring. Setting it to 0 will produce all-white stars