First full Maya tutorial
Open Maya Autodesk 2011
Go to Surfaces and create a sphere
Press 5 to fill in the wireframe
Make the sphere HUGE. Press r to open the resize tool and zoom out and resize over and over and over again until you have a REALLY big sphere (its up to you how big).
Right click and hold. Choose assign new material.
Pick a Lambert and rename it "space"
Make the color black
Select the sphere
Under the rendering drop down, choose paint effects-->make paintable
Open the outliner and select the sphere you just made
Now open the visor by going to window-->General Editors-->Visor
Choose galactic
Choose a paint effect
Under Rendering, double click the tool all the way to the right, the 3D paint tool.
Select the sphere in the outliner and scroll down in the 3D paint tool and choose assign/edit textures.
Make the size x and size y about 2000 to increase the detail of the brush.
press assign/edit textures to confirm
Be sure to check update on stroke and save texture on stroke in the 3d paint tool
Decorate the sphere in any way you feel like.
Move the camera inside the sphere and make another sphere
duplicate this sphere until you have a bunch that are all over the place inside your bigger painted sphere
Once you have all of those sphere,s select them all and make a new material and name it stars
Make it white
Under special effects of that lambert, turn up the glow intensity
Choose a good viewpoint and RENDER
