Hi Tracers!

Currently, I'm toying with the idea of visualizing one of those freaky
ideas in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" - the Magrathean
Workshop of Worlds... I started with an animation of a planet's surface
developing out of a plane by using larger and larger hf_gray_16
renderings of the same bozo pattern, the camera moves toward a defined
point in the planet's lowlands, a few meters above the surface, and then

occurs:

For the starry sky (which during the panoramic turn slowly changes to a
blue daytime desert sky), I used a pigment pattern, and when I change
the camera's look_at point, the stars dance wildly across the scene from
frame to frame, instead of moving slowly out of the view field. Of
course I could instead use an image map, but as my heightfield for the
surface is already VERY big (about 8000 by 6000 pixels) and I only have
256 megs of RAM, I'm quite uneasy about doing this - to look properly,
such a star imagemap should at least be 2000 by 1000, not to mention the
distortions towards the poles.

Is there a way to create a procedural starfield which behaves correctly
when animated?

Why, in general, is no steady movement of the stars possible with
pigment patterns on a sky_sphere?

See you in Khyberspace -
http://www.geocities.com/electricafghan/index-e.html

Yadgar

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