How the Spore Galaxy was created…

Ocean Quiqley’s blog has been updated reflecting his work with the galaxy in Spore.  He shares his trials and errors as well as a few images from the process:

I had a problem when the galaxy was seen edgewise; all of the stars would overlap and make the center of the galaxy burn out to white. I used the dark dustlanes to obscure and darken them, and that pretty much fixed that.

We had to make the stars large enough that they wouldn’t alias with the screen’s pixels, but if we kept them above pixel scale, when you zoomed out they would rapidly accumulate and burn to white.
So we made a shader that faded them out and controlled their scale, keeping them just the right size and brightness as you zoomed in and out.