I've been wanting to render galaxy flythroughs in VR for ages, but Blender's 1000 image texture limit has been restrictive. Not any more - this has been removed in 2.79. Also there are encoding options which look to me to be giving much better results, though I can't vouch for how well this will translate to YouTube. Here's a fairly small proof of concept test with 5,000 galaxies, detected with (and with distance measurements) from the ALFALFA hydrogen survey. Optical images are from the Sloan Digital Sky survey.
This is designed for VR headsets/Google cardboard. I'm curious what people are using to view them as my own headset (so far as I can tell) cannot get YouTube to play 3D 360 VR correctly, so I just view the original video file instead.
I do these periodically whenever ALFALFA updates their catalogue. The first one, the 30% catalogue, had about 11,000 galaxies. The second (70%) had about 22,000. The final catalogue has 31,000. It should be entirely feasible to render that, the galaxy images use a surprisingly small amount of memory.
More explanations of the renders here : http://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2013/03/galaxies-are-pretty.html
https://youtu.be/5W1i0Rm1bQY
Looking good so far, just looking at the YouTube video. Then found myself falling down a rabbit-hole of Rhys videos: enjoyed your Asteroid 1998QE2 video, very nice asteroid texture, clicked through to your Xeelee -asteroid battle, which is awesome, then backtracked to your German satellite from 2001 : A Space Odyssey which I had not seen before. Nifty stuff my friend.
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