(For an improved version of this star globe, please see Background Stars v2.)
Do you need night sky stars with accurate magnitudes and a good looking milky way for the background of your whole Maya scene? Do you want 360 degrees of coverage without any stitch marks, seams, or pole pinching? Well here is what I call the ‘star globe’. (Named out of ease for communicating with my team.)
Just import it, point-constrain it to your camera, and scale the star globe to surround your entire scene. This insures that the star globe will follow the cameras position but not its rotation. For a final render, we typically use preview quality settings and don’t have any aliasing/blinking of the stars. Fisheye camera typically at 500 focal length to shortcut the grey blurry line problem, but it depends how big you’ve scaled the star globe (you’ll know easily if the stars look blurry and weird).
Also, make sure to check the light linking of the star globe so that there are no lights attached. This is because the star globe material has the texture set to incandescence. This insures that it will look always look the same without having to worry about other light sources accidentally brightening the stars.
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maya scene (using mental ray) – star globe

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