Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2009/08/03/learning-how-to-do-glass-and-stars-in-blender/

  I decided to use a royalty-free picture of space as a background to the spaceship I’m designing, but as you can see (left) it turned out to be a little bit, in your face. So I decided I could put a sheet of dark glass in front of it to take the edge off it a bit, kind of like a filter.

The only problem was I had no idea how to do that. After experimenting with the sliders a bit I got nowhere, so I stared looking on the internet for some documentation or a tutorial. The first I found, Doc:Tutorials/Materials/Glass (Solid and Hollow) – BlenderWiki, turned out to be a little complex for what I wanted to do.

But hidden in all the complexity there was an answer, just hit the Ztransparency button and move the alpha slider left and right, couldn’t be simpler, and certainly a lot simpler than I expected. In the image this dark filter I created is covering half the starscape.

Wile I was fiddling with Blender trying to get the starscape to work I found a few sites talking about how to add stars to a 3D image, including this one > http://showcase.netins.net/web/fourcats/index.php?id=33. Wow there is a stars button in blender.

Oh and as I was checking my site stats today – I’m obsessed with them – I noticed that a few people were being referred by Shawn Driscoll’s CG Blog. So I checked it out and found a very nice, and funny read indeed. He is very knowledgeable and skilled with the old 3D, but he’s also into trains. Cool.