The real answer is that space, it’s pretty empty of, well,… everything. It’s boring so we VFX artists are constantly trying to find way to put stuff in front of the camera. If you look at some of the Astronomy Picture of the Day pics of near-earth orbits, unless you’re looking at a space station or something cool on the planet, everything else is either totally black or a lens flare. Those flares actually happen quite a bit up there because the optics get fogged by the extreme temp changes.

Make sense?

I surfed up a bunch of electron microscope images and kept going back to the render over and over. The light does really odd stuff at this scale. The edges of things glow with rimlight from a non-existent light source.

I got this effect by putting a Fresnel Falloff in the Diffuse slot with White on the edges and whatever color you want on the inside. I used the same Falloff map for self-illumination. I used a Fractal Noise generator in the Displacement slot and then Turbo-Smoothed the crap out of the geometry. A Single white Omni Light with Area Shadows and a SkyLight with the shadows set to ON and 10 Rays per Sample lights the scene. Rendered out at 1080p with a Z-Channel pass and composited in Photoshop. I’ve got a freshy 4 second render of this stuff with an animated camera waiting for me to do the comp in After Effects.

Zoom!

I need to get this familiar with Maya now.

Oliver: Before you get to into it, those are “Helix” splines available from the create panel and then set to render. The material uses “Falloff” in the transparency slot. Play with that.