| Create a sphere and make it larger and put it directly in front
of the camera. The material placed on the sphere is what will give the
illusion of the nebula itself.
| 
|
| Go into the materials editor for the sphere (The little M
icon,) and click on the circle that says "SURFACE" above it. This will
change to "VOLUME" making the sphere have a volumetric material which is
what we want. Raise the edge softness to 100, and change the fuzzy factor
to around 280. You may want to experiment with lowering the base density
and then lowering the fuzzy factor. Click on the A column to make a
material appear if there isn't one enabled already. Assign the A material
to Diffuse, Ambient, and Base Density.
| 
|
| For the A material, hold down shift and click on the small
arrow in the top right corner. This will bring up a graphical list of all
of the available textures. I chose the "Geographic" texture from the bump
category, but almost any texture that has a fairly volatile transparency
map will work. Set the texture mode to random by clicking on the arrow in
the bottom right corner of the A texture.
| 
|
| That is all there is to it.... Volumetrics can be used to
obtain all sorts of unique effects. Try changing around the texture values
to come up with some interesting images.
|  |
