Animating stars, galaxies, supernovae, etc.

JMNewcomer

I am interested in building animations telling the story of The Universe from the Big Bang to the present. This involves doing the Big Bang itself, the coalescing of stars, supernovae, etc. Lots of particles moving about. Cross-sections of giant stars as they begin their lives as hydrogen fusion and end them with the creation of iron. Planetesimals colliding, formation of solar disks, planets, etc. Lots of physics going on. I am looking for libraries of "characters" for these animations. Said libraries do not have to be free. Various searches of the products on the DAZ site have not been productive, so I'm asking here.
joe

Dream Cutter

The animation may have to be developed however E-On Vue is the app that is best suited for this purpose. There are planets & starfields available for Vue and using simple node translations you would be able to accomplish many of the animations. Also there is a particle engine and advanced lighting effects that you could apply to objects to create animated asteroid fields, explosions and nebula. In DAZ there is a solar-system animation, but that's about all I am aware of.

Animated Triburte to DAZ 3D in WebGL

evilproducer

Carrara, which is owned by DAZ 3D has a particle system with metaballs that can attract to each other. There is also a metaball modeler, spline modeler and vertex modeler as well as Carrara's standard rigid body physics engine and Bullet rigid and soft body physics engine. There are numerous modifiers and deformers. Some that may help include, explode, warp, etc. in my opinion, for the complex things you wish to do, Carrara would be a better choice than DAZ Studio, which in itself isn't a pretty good piece of software, but it is essentially a virtual photography studio.

Carrara comes with a selection of Presets. One of those is Space which has some of our planets and moons. You can also download spherical texture maps from NASA.

Carrara also comes with a very powerful shading system that allows for some amazing things to be created. Holly Wetcircuit has an extensive tutorial site with some very good tutorials on how to easily make some suns and planets in Carrara:
http://www.3d.wetcircuit.com/

Holly is also working as a volunteer administrator at The Carrara Cafe which has upwards of 300 tutorials (both video and written) made by Carrara users, as well as past issues of C3DE a Carrara e-zine which contains tutorials, artist profiles and much more:
http://carraracafe.com/

There are volumetric clouds, a surface replicator, a non-surface replicator and almost everything can be animated.

Dartanbeck, one of the nicest folks you'll ever meet, created a Carrara product that may help you out as well:
http://www.daz3d.com/starry-sky-for-carrara

Here's a couple of my own humble space based animations:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS-sNje4k0o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fyKOSUTsg