[watsisname]

Hey T-LoW, if you need more textures you can find some nice ones from sites like cgtextures.com and such.  They'll require a bit of work to turn them into planet surfaces, but you seem to have a knack for the trade already. 

[Rodo]

I recommned you cgtextures as well, it's a good site with all kinds of textures.

[Herra Tohtori]

[Rodo]

Must have taken you years to tone down and repaint the hole image, amazing work as always Herra!

[Herra Tohtori]

I used this as basis.

I Despeckled it to remove local stars from the image (since I didn't want another Sol system, that's already taken care of), run a Gaussian blur filter to smooth it out a bit, rescaled it to 16384x8192.

Then I made a 16384x8192 greyscale noise layer, spherically distorted so that it can be mapped onto a sphere. After that it was a simple matter of using the modified galactic plane map as alpha and colour mask for the greyscale noise layer and adjusting the levels, contrast and brightness to what I felt was appropriate.

Now I have a generic galactic plane texture that I can mix with normal starfield, or nebula textures. I suspect it will be quite useful in the future.

[Rodo]

I see, so you mapped a sphere with two versions of the same image to get it done.. nice!
I used the same image a while back to make the a sol skybox, but I left the image as it was and it looked cool, but too bright to be realistic I'm afraid.
This is gonna be used on BP and MVP's a presume right?

[Herra Tohtori]

I see, so you mapped a sphere with two versions of the same image to get it done.. nice!
I used the same image a while back to make the a sol skybox, but I left the image as it was and it looked cool, but too bright to be realistic I'm afraid.
This is gonna be used on BP and MVP's a presume right?

We will see how it goes!

The great advantage with current MediaVP standard starfield is, of course, the fact that it's so resource-friendly. It uses a single 2048^2 texture, while this one would use six 2048^2 textures for standard, and six 4096^2 textures for Advanced, so the memory increases are substantial.

It then depends on whether people want to use it, which is a function of how it affects performance and how much it makes things look better than current starfield - currently I haven't checked how it looks in-game.

Mainly, my aim was to make a starfield for Blue Planet that would reduce the background dichotomy between Sol skybox and non-Sol skyboxes. It is somewhat weird to have the galactic plane visible in Sol skybox while other systems in the galaxe lack it. Whether or not it is adopted by MediaVP's will remain to be seen.

[Scourge of Ages]

More starfield is always welcome! Just throw 'em in and call them into mvadvanced as starfield2 and starfield3 (if those are available).
Do optional things go into the MVPs? Or would you need to release them seperately?

[Rodo]

Another thing, so you resized the original image... how so? I mean, when you resize an image the result will be... well awkward, and the sizes you are talking about seem astronomic.
I guess you had an already big BIG base image to work on right?, (being best to shrink than to enlarge) IIRC the one I used was 6000 x something.

[Herra Tohtori]

Another thing, so you resized the original image... how so? I mean, when you resize an image the result will be... well awkward, and the sizes you are talking about seem astronomic.
I guess you had an already big BIG base image to work on right?, (being best to shrink than to enlarge) IIRC the one I used was 6000 x something.

I used the enlarged image of the galactic plane as an alpha mask and colourization source for a greyscale noise layer. That way, the blurring that results from scaling up the original image is neutralized - all the detail comes from the noise layer, and the enlarged image works only to determine the intensity and colour of the pixels on the noise layer.

Here's an example:

Let's say you have an image of a star cluster or elliptical galaxy, which is very low-res and you want to increase the resolution.



It's so low res that no individual stars are shown. However, it gives you the general intensity at different locations, and gradients scale up relatively well, so let's increase the resolution from 64^2 to 512^2:



Now, this is indeed a bit awkward looking. It doesn't look like a star cluster, it looks like a blob.

So I make a noise layer:



...and apply the enlarged blob as an alpha mask:



Then I apply the enlarged blob as a colour layer:



...and finally I applied the enlarged blob as screen layer, and reduced the opacity of the noise layer to 30%, resulting in this:




At this point it's a matter of calibrating the layers as you like, depending on whether it's an elliptic galaxy (more fuzzy) or a closed cluster (more grainy/noisy as you can see individual stars better).


In a nutshell this is what I did to the galactic plane there.

[Rodo]

Then the final rendering is a galatic plane resembling the original shape, but with totally random generated starts.
Brillant!

[watsisname]

Oh my, it's a greenish planet!  



I was originally inspired/trying to make a rendition of Gliese 581g, but halfway through the creation process I changed my mind and ended up making Vasuda Prime instead (at least as I always imagined it to look).

I put up the TGA here in 1024² resolution too if anyone wants to use it.

edit 10/27:  Removed silly Australian cloud and fixed atmospheric halo.

[Scourge of Ages]

That is really nice.

[Rodo]

that looks good, really good

[Snail]

Not how I imagined Vasuda, but very awesome.

[Scourge of Ages]

Wait, is that Australia?

[Droid803]

That reminds me a lot of that greenish planet AoA used for Delta Serpentis.

[ShadowGorrath]

Wait, is that Australia?

Seems so. It turned into a cloud and flew away to an alien planet?

[watsisname]

WTF Australia, get off of my planet! D:

and lo, for the cosmic Watsisname, in all his divine righteousness, did erase twenty million cloud-Aussies from their miserable existence.

[Sushi]

Amazing! One critique: the atmosphere-halo stops pretty suddenly on the dark side and just looks cut off. Maybe a more gradual transition?