OUAN405 - Process & Production: Creating Star Fields (Research)

As part of my animation idea for the Classical Elements brief, (see other blog posts regarding narrative, ideas, character design etc.) I decided to set the story in outer space. As a consequence of this, I had to learn how to create a star field; something I've never had the opportunity of doing before! So, I began to look online to find an effective and simple method of creating a realistic-looking universe using Photoshop.

One of the few I looked at was incredibly easy to understand and very useful. This was created by Greg Martin (http://gallery.artofgregmartin.com/tuts_arts/making_a_star_field.html) and gave a detailed walkthrough of creating a star field using the tools in Photoshop.

I learned a lot from this and eventually managed to create two fairly convincing images of which I could then go on to use as my backgrounds for my animation. I think two or three is a good amount to create as I'll have some variation in where the stars are and I can swap them around in my animation as I please. (Stars don't stay in the same place all the time!)

Although I cannot upload Photoshop files onto Blogger and there is no way of me exporting to JPEG as Photoshop doesn't exist on this laptop, I can assure you that my example ended up looking identical to Greg Martin's...