For this project, I took the techniques I developed for my recreation of Ann K.'s Galaxy artwork from ArtStation and used them to create a more in-depth piece of my own. In the initial recreation of Ann K.'s piece, I discovered several useful techniques for galaxy creation (such as defining volumetric density by the inverse-square of distance from a curve and displacing voxels with noise functions). Since then, I have also come up with several new techniques which I have implemented in order to create a more unique and polished final product.
Ann K.'s original piece can be seen below.
And below is the recreation I developed for my previous project.
For this new galaxy I decided to start with spiraling tendrils, instead of the concentric circles the previous iteration used. This way, it is more visually accurate to a real spiral galaxy.
Another improvement I've made since the last iteration is moving the volumetric displacement to the shader level (as opposed to the geometry level). This way, the displacement is calculated per-pixel at render time, allowing for intricate detail regardless of voxel resolution.
Something else I noticed when looking at real spiral galaxies is that, alongside their bright spirals of stars, they also have dark, absorbent layers as well. In my previous galaxy, all volumetric effects were emissive, so this time I implemented a dense scattering volume as well.
A third set of spiral volumes use a secondary noise pattern to break up the shapes and add more imperfection to the overall structure of the galaxy.
Similar to the first galaxy project, another emissive volume is used for the glowing black hole in the center.
Stars are scattered around in their own displaced spiral pattern, along with an extra bright star in the center to help accentuate the black hole in compositing.
Background stars are scattered evenly, with random variation in blackbody-color, intensity, and size.
Everything is then composited together for the final effect.
