Updating StarScape
Well, that was an interesting bug fix, if somewhat unexpected. It seems that a very significant bug somehow went undetected in the initial version of StarScape. What happened was that, in some circumstances, creating a scene, saving it, and reloading it lost all the settings for some or all of the layers. Looking at the problem, it was clear that the initial design was not going to work correctly and a rethink was needed.
The result of this was that the user interface was redone as a dynamic interface description. The initial version had up to 10 layers, and you could switch between them using a drop-down menu. The new interface still has layers, and they work as they did before, but now you have to add (and/or remove) additional layers as required. There's a base layer, which can't be removed, although it can be disabled, and then as many extra layers as needed.
This sounds more cumbersome to use but it does have some advantages (in addition to fixing the save/load bug, of course!). For one thing, you can have as many layers as desired - there is no limit now on the layer count. Also, you can now see the settings of two or more layers at the same time; previously, you had to switch between layers, so you could only see one layer at a time. In this version you can compare layer settings when you're trying out different settings to see which suits the best.
One thing a revision also lets a developer do is add some feature(s) which become desirable after the initial release. In my case, I was never very happy with the way the star glow, if used, was implemented - there needed to be better control over the result. The same was also true of star flares, I wanted to have a way to control the length and width of flares which wasn't previously possible.
The other thing was to add a hue shift to each layer. Suppose you've created a star field layer. You like the pattern of stars, the size distribution, and so on but the colours aren't quite what you want. One solution of course is to change the colour gradient, but if it has a lot of knots changing some or all of them is tedious, to say the least. A more brute-force, but much faster, solution is to add a hue shift. In StarScape, this is exactly the same as adding the shader to a Layer shader and adding a Hue/Sat/Lightness effect, then adjusting the Hue value - except that in StarScape the setting is implemented for each layer separately, not simply the final output from all the layers. These images show a star field using a gradient preset supplied with Cinema:
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On the left, hue shift is zero; on the right, it's set to 270 degrees. You can see that the star pattern is the same but the colours are quite different - and not a single gradient knot was changed.
Anyway, StarScape should be much more reliable now, and hopefully the new features will be useful.
Page last updated February 26th 2025