[Lightspeed]

@redmenace: it's possible but limits you to 256 colours as ANI is the only supported animation format

@cannonfodder:

that's not what I meant.



I mean something like this, where the actual nebula is softer, more cloudy and less 'edgy' as well as the colour tone is more unified.

[KARMA]

Originally posted by redmenace
now what would be great would be far off lightning strikes in the nebula. just parts of it lighting up randomly or in a sequence. But I am sure that is far from possible.

not necessarily.
In skyboxes you may animate some parts of the nebula. Problem is that at the detail level we're talking about it would be very performance hit
Also, I have a little idea about localized nebs, which was expressed IIRC for the frist time by venom:
Make a nebula model, not too high in pcount, you don't need it, and map it so that it's invisible.
IIRC you can have invisible polys not colliding with objects, if not possible make this mesh with lots of weird intersections, to confuse the bsp tree generation.
Make many thruster models (the name in the hierachy) with shapes designed for this purposes, and map them with some animated nebula textures, and make the thruster glows in many directions/sizes.
Those thrusters will have to intersect the mesh, will intersect eachother and will be the various neb elements. The glows will be the hot areas of the neb.
Give to the pof hitpoints, and in fred make it undestructable but with a very low % of hull (not sure if this will work, but I think yes). As result you will see the lightning bolts that FS2 use when a ship is near to be destroyed over the invisible mesh.

[Lt.Cannonfodder]

Originally posted by Lightspeed

@cannonfodder:
I mean something like this, where the actual nebula is softer, more cloudy and less 'edgy' as well as the colour tone is more unified.

Meh, I like bright and cheery colors

[Taristin]

Originally posted by Lt.Cannonfodder


Meh, I like bright and cheery colors

Well, there's a difference between cheery and cotton-candy.

I like those EVE ones, as well. There's something about an eggshell colored nebula that's amazing.

[Lightspeed]

I like the soft colour and almost non existant contrast, as well as the lighting.

[Nico]

non existent contrast? going from pure black to almost white? hmm

[Lightspeed]

I dont see any pure black or pure white in that EvE screenie

[RandomTiger]

It would take the fun out of it but I think theres a photoshop plugin that makes nebulas.

[Solatar]

Glitterato I think it's called.

[Taristin]

And it's crappah! Best to make them by hand.

[Rictor]

I agree with everything Lightspeed has said so far.

That is all.

[Nuke]

if you have kai power tools you can do of cool stuff. i use lensflare for weapon glows, scenebulder to make interface art (lets you load and render 3ds files), fraxflameII makes cool fractal based nebulas, lightning is just awesom to make ligtning strikes. id highly recomend getting them.

[Nuke]

get fractal wit it

[Lt.Cannonfodder]

Originally posted by Nuke
get fractal wit it

Very cool, but doesn't look like a nebula at all. Still, very nice

[karajorma]

Would make a nice subspace effect though

[Lt.Cannonfodder]

Updated:





Now please tell me if these are good enough or should I just drop the whole thing? I might be able to make them I bit better, but the basic look is what you see here. And please note that jpg compression takes away some of the smaller and more detailed patterns.

[CmdKewin]

Uhm.. actually, EvE's nebulas aren't 2D at all... they are made of particles, so it's easier to get a smoother and nicer effect.

I'll post a decent picture later.

[KARMA]

Originally posted by Lt.Cannonfodder
Updated:





Now please tell me if these are good enough or should I just drop the whole thing? I might be able to make them I bit better, but the basic look is what you see here. And please note that jpg compression takes away some of the smaller and more detailed patterns.

The second one is interesting, but the problem is that they don't add much in my opinion to the vanilla fs2 nebs.
I suggest you to go search some cool images from nasa and other sources (I posted many links in the skybox thread of some months ago, and many images too), and try to reproduce em. The greg martin's tutorials and others could be useful

[Nico]

No, they're not
I've travelled enough lightyears in the beta to know they're 2D, like in any other game.

[CmdKewin]

What i meant is that they are made of 3d particles, squished on a 2d plane while rendering