Maya Galaxies - Development

These Galaxies were made in Maya, simply by aquiring a hi-res image of a Galaxy on line, taking it into Photoshop and creating a transparency map by converting a duplicate of the original image to grey scale. In these image are assigned to the colour and transparency nodes of a new lambert, then this lambert is assigned to a polyplane.

Once I was happy with one Galaxy I duplicated it six times, back in Photoshop I adjusted the Hue of the original and save it as something diferent, I did this a further 5 times. In Maya I duplicated the shader network 5 dimes and applied a different coloured galaxy to each polyplane before randomizing size and position.

I then duplicated my galaxies many times and made a motion path run through them, the above video is the result after rendering a Tiff sequence.