Originally posted by Thunder:
1) the background nebula, to "stringy" but on the whole good.
2) can you change the size/brightness of the stars? they all look kinda blurred and uniform...
3) Explosion, kinda... pink/green 
4) The rest is great - good job (especially if it really did only take 10 minutes).
1) That's my
standard nebula background procedural material - I usually adjust it to fit better on the scene, but I didn't even touch it this time.
2) The stars are that way due to the focus of the camera. You may notice that the fighter is also slightly blurred. The focus is set at the beam, anything past a certain range forward or backward from that gets blurry.
3) I don't like the usual explosion effects. They don't seem very feasible on space, so I prefer to use a more "energy blast" kinda effect. If you want it in other colors, I can do it no prob.
4) Thanks, it really took less than 10 minutes - I have the ships ready on MAX format (with all material properties set) so I just had to work on the video post settings. If you didn't notice, I'm using a different effect on the beam core, it creates a nice (very subtle) distinction from the standard glow, and I hope it'll animate quite nicely. Let's see what happens. (actually, I've already seen it, but unfortunately I can't show the animated work yet).
