Originally posted by Kazan
styxx: did you have a program that you could give geometry data to and have it generate the asteroid belt - or did you have to do it manually
You know, something like that in max isn't that difficult to make
the real problem is: "Will my PC be able to handle all that?"
The answer to this, if you do it the hard way, is generally:"No, damnit!!!!". That's when you show skills, like Styxx, obviously, to simplify the whole thing w/o ruining the visuals.
Dunno how Styxx did, but I believe I'd use particles, with a planar particle, with random asteroid pics applied to them ( with an alpha chanel of course, don't want a black square around the roids ), and all those particles aligned to the camera normals. I wouldn't even bother with high poly asteroids, in fact, unless there's one coming REAL close to the camera ( if the camera moves slowly ), with motion blur, you won't see the difference anyway.
If you want them to rotate, replace the pic with an avi, et voila ( yes, you can use avi as maps ).