Advertisement

You're blocking ads, which pay for BlenderNation. Read about other ways to support us.

3D Star Map Add-on

6

Jumping Puzzle writes:

Explore the stars by importing up to more than 3,750 stars into your blender viewport based on scientific data through an easy to use sidebar panel. You can then explore their positions, features and movement in the blender viewport or use the imported stars to render beautiful star maps, scientific images, animations and more.

Main features:

  • Limit the amount of imported stars based on distance from Earth, spectral classes, apparent magnitude and more
  • Display the stars' names in the viewport
  • Place the stars in galactic or celestial coordinates
  • Watch how the stars move over time based on their proper motion and radial velocity
  • Simulate the night sky: All stars are projected onto a sphere and their apparent magnitude is used for emission
  • Automatically connect the stars to show star constellations

3D Star Map is available on Gumroad, and you can download a free demo version here.

About the Author

blender 3D artist

6 Comments

  1. If the night sky mode could be linked to the sun position add on to give the night sky from a given location on Earth at a specific time, this would be an awesome add on. The only other accurate night sky add on available only covers the northern hemisphere, which is useless to me in Australia.

    • I think the problem with that is that most Rayleigh scatterers occur at "infinite" distance whereas this add-on puts stars at a finite distance, putting the whole of our known universe inside Earth's atmosphere, which i think we can all agree would be very bad.

      Perhaps the most realistic way to handle it would be to composite the two together.

      Nonetheless, I am pretty excited about this add-on as-is, and look forward to its success and remain hopeful in its development.

  2. Or simply render the scene as an equirectangular EXR and use it as an HDR background. My point is that for star gazers to be able to orient the map with their time and location would be cool so they could have an idea where to look in the night sky for the real thing.

    • Jumping Puzzle on

      An option to set the rotation of the night sky sphere based on time and location is definitely something I can consider adding to my add-on in the future.

      • That would be very cool! I also remember years ago playing a submarine simulator game and in the forums there were some lamentations over not being being able to navigate by the stars. Your add on would be also potentially be a huge plus to game devs if the orientation by time and location feature were added.

Leave A Reply

To add a profile picture to your message, register your email address with Gravatar.com. To protect your email address, create an account on BlenderNation and log in when posting a message.

Advertisement

×