Starfield

[Slammer]

I´m really, really happy with Affinity, but one or two things remain that have me scratching my head.

I want to do a starfield, really, really want to do a starfield, with nebulae and all the dreamy trippy psychedelic stuff I dream about late at night when I have listened to pink floyd, or drank some cheap plonk from Aldi.
Now with layers and blending and noise and sweet, sweet perlin noise and pulling and shoving I am almost where I want to be, as in the left hand panel, which is for this instance at 18.3% however if I zoom in or zoom out I get what you see on the right panel or worse.
Is there a way to get a better result or have I reached a limit of Affinity?

[Slammer]

Trying my hardest here, I can make it worse with ease, but it ain´t getting better.

[Lee D]

It may help if you can share your file and expand on your workflow and what you would like to acheive.

[Slammer]

Sure, send it where to?

 

[firstdefence]

A lot of Nebula creation is done using brushes, layers and blend modes. There are plenty of brushes to do this, even planet, sun, galaxy brushes.

I have to also mention FilterForge my all time favourite Plugin Filter.

The image below was made using Rons steam and smoke brushes for the nebula and the planet was made using filterforge
 

 

 

[Slammer]

On 10/20/2020 at 9:50 PM, firstdefence said:

A lot of Nebula creation is done using brushes, layers and blend modes. There are plenty of brushes to do this, even planet, sun, galaxy brushes.

I have to also mention FilterForge my all time favourite Plugin Filter.

The image below was made using Rons steam and smoke brushes for the nebula and the planet was made using filterforge
 

 

 

Wow, now that´s what I am talking about. Basically I want to be able to do something like this I did with ye olde photoshoppe a while back. Now I simply import the old PS starfield file in Affinity and use that, however I want to do a new one in Affinity and I simply can´t get the starfield to look right. At least not with the same technique I used in Photoshop.
 

[ESPR]

The Affinity Xenon brushpack has some brushes that lets you make sparkly cosmic stuff like galaxies, starfields, etc.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/store/product/xenon-brush-pack-bundle/

 

The examples in the link only show one image with galaxies, but you get three brushpacks, one is entirely dedicated to starfields and called "galactic".

The other two are lensflares and lighting effects, like lasers and bokeh.

https://affinityspotlight.com/article/painting-with-light-xenon-brushes/

 

[Slammer]

I know about the Xenon brushes and they are amaizing, there are also a lot of other brushes that basically do the same thing, but with brushes you don´t have the ability to create something like a starfield from scratch and that is where I want to go.

[ESPR]

51 minutes ago, Slammer said:

I know about the Xenon brushes and they are amaizing, there are also a lot of other brushes that basically do the same thing, but with brushes you don´t have the ability to create something like a starfield from scratch and that is where I want to go.

I dont understand what you are asking for.

Do you want to create your starfield with a vectorfilter ?

 

Why cant you create your starfield from scratch with brushes ??

What does PS do, that Affinity is lacking ??

[Slammer]

The technique I use is create image file, say 300x300 with a small box in the center, fill with black and apply perlin noise, enlarge the box and apply noise, bring the threshold down and color anyway you want. If you do this four or five times you get your basic starfield. If you apply the noise in the smaller box and then enlarge you can adjust the size of the stars as you wish. Then it should be a simple case of applying perlin noise clouds and blend to get your nebula effect, perhaps a few dubbings of cloud or smoke brushes. This is how the first entry on this topic was created and as you see if you stay in the same percentage it´s ok-ish but enlarge or reduce and you get the nightmares you see in the other pictures.

The last two pictures I posted above were created in this manner in Photoshop and I would like to find a way to recreate this in Affinity.