[Nico]

No, it's just there's actually some places in eve where nebulas are actually not beautiful.

[Lt.Cannonfodder]

Well, this is propably the best I can do. I did aim for a Freespacy looking nebula.

[Rictor]

Nuke you mentioned a plugin for kai power tools that lets you make particles and so forth. Do you think it could be of any use in creating nebulas?

[Bobboau]

I like it,
but I'm not sure we/you'r getting the bast bang for the buck

[Lightspeed]

Cannonfodder, they look too Freespacey to look good. Might post an example of what I have in mind later.

[Lt.Cannonfodder]

Originally posted by Lightspeed
Cannonfodder, they look too Freespacey to look good. Might post an example of what I have in mind later.

As I said before, I like Freespace's nebulas. That's why my version looks like that

[Lightspeed]

My first try at doing one...



Still very basic, needs work etc, but to give you a general idea.

convienient 1024x1024 size for in-game use.

[Lt.Cannonfodder]

OK, Lightspeed. You win. No arguing about that. It looks lightyears better than my attempts

How you do that, I have no clue. I'm just happy seeing your work

[Lightspeed]

step 1 - pick 2-5 real space nebulae as a base images
step 2 - remove all stars from them without messing up the images and cut out the useful parts of them
step 3 - create a blank image of the proportions you want to have (1024x1024 in this case)
step 4 - flick the parts  together, adjust and tweak them to work on the shape you want to have
step 5 - edit in details and extra stuff by hand
step 6 - add effects (on this one, I added a blurred layer rendered with "Soft Light")
step 7 - adjust hue, contrast & brightness to match what you wanted to get
step 8 - Enjoy!

Its a lot of hard work and fiddling, and crappy results on the first tries, but it's worth it.

[Fineus]

I always wondered how you did this stuff - figured it was to much to do by hand! Greg Martin is the only guy I know of capable of that level of work...

That said, it's damn good ****. If that was part of a skybox with similar "whisps" of nebula going the entire way around (though perhaps not as many more big set-piece sections) it'd look incredible. As an aside though the star looks maybe a bit large, almost as if it's out on the edge of the nebula but very dim. I realise as you said though it's only early-stage

[Unknown Target]

Lightspeed wins, again

[Lightspeed]

Originally posted by Kalfireth
I always wondered how you did this stuff - figured it was to much to do by hand! Greg Martin is the only guy I know of capable of that level of work...

Oh, I could probably do that, but it would take ages (and leave less time for making it look actually good). And since Real Life™ can provide eye candy like this there's no reason in not using it.

Although you will still have to do at least a quarter of it from scratch since normally only small parts are really suitable and fit together. It's sometimes almost more work than doing it from scratch

Originally posted by Kalfireth
That said, it's damn good ****. If that was part of a skybox with similar "whisps" of nebula going the entire way around (though perhaps not as many more big set-piece sections) it'd look incredible. As an aside though the star looks maybe a bit large, almost as if it's out on the edge of the nebula but very dim. I realise as you said though it's only early-stage

I don't think it would be too good with a skybox. Everyone uses stuff like this on skyboxed and it results in making it look blurred and weird (unless you have a uber-high textures skybox slowing you down to death). The Idea is to use this as a normal background, and have some other pieces fitting it, so you can puzzle together your own 'skybox'. Heck, I'd even be willing to go through all the campaign missions to adjust the backgrounds if necessary

Might be necessary to give the FS standard 'skybox' a poly upgrade though. We'll have to see - haven't tried it in-game yet.

The star's alright, I did it like this on purpose. It's kinda in the center point of the nebula. And yeah, the nebula could use some more work - especially not too fond of the part lower left to the star (in the bottom left corner of the image).

[Fineus]

Re: Upping the polies on the skybox itself, you can almost count on it being necessary - there's obvious warping on the stock backgrounds in some cases, it looks terrible.

Also, if you're going to piece them together it's necessary to have lots of whispy nebula and fewer "big set piece" ones. My reasoning being that if you look at the stock nebulas they're all quite definite and bright. Joining them together looks ugly and indeed rather un-gas like compared to things like EVE.

[KARMA]

I finally managed to fix some errors on this neb so that now can be used in the background pof

and since I was working on the file, I noticed casually, while I was toggling visibility of some layers, that it was possible to obtain a cool image from it, this one:
which once flipped/rotated will be used as a third background pof in the Starwars conversion.
they are 100%handwork (and take helluva time to do em), and I'm already using them on high poly background pofs, with another texture as a basic starfield tiled 5 times.
Btw guys, if you like em, I don't mind giving the bacground pofs to be used in the scp's additional artworks vp too

[Lightspeed]

I've noticed the warping partially is due to the low-res textures being used, though. When I use a stock planet at screen filling size theres warping like hell, if I use one of my substitutes theres no warping at all. I'll have to see if warping will be killed by having high res nebulae, but i'm not too sure; so a poly upgrade might indeed be necessary.

And yeah, that was my plan. Is there any limitation to the background table?

I was thinking 7 - 14 whispy ambient ones per 'real' nebula.

[Lightspeed]

@Karma:

1) *cough* [lvlshot] is your friend!

2) stars in a background = no good, as FS2 will add it's stars too and itll look odd having some of them with and some without motion blur, also stars in the background images will tend to get blurry

3) fix lenseflares?

[Lt.Cannonfodder]

Originally posted by Lightspeed
step 1 - pick 2-5 real space nebulae as a base images
step 2 - remove all stars from them without messing up the images and cut out the useful parts of them
step 3 - create a blank image of the proportions you want to have (1024x1024 in this case)
step 4 - flick the parts  together, adjust and tweak them to work on the shape you want to have
step 5 - edit in details and extra stuff by hand
step 6 - add effects (on this one, I added a blurred layer rendered with "Soft Light")
step 7 - adjust hue, contrast & brightness to match what you wanted to get
step 8 - Enjoy!

Its a lot of hard work and fiddling, and crappy results on the first tries, but it's worth it

You used real images as a stating point? I'll have to try that.

My goal was to create similar yet better nebulas than the originals. I didn't wan't to make them totally different but more detailed and generally better looking. I guess I can still fiddle around with my version but I doubt it will be anything like The Master has done

EDIT: @Karma

Eek! Those lens flares just burn my eyes. Lose half of them and it'll look better.

Otherwise, not bad. This thread is starting to look really nice

[Lightspeed]

See, I realized FS2's system was crappy all along so I'm going for a change.

[KARMA]

stars are necessary because the starfield has to be coherent to the background of the neb.
Just reduce at minimum the stardensity in fred, and it'll work fine, I already tested in past and it looks damn nice;). The only problems were when the stars in the background were too dense (one of the things I fixed), causing an odd result.
And I'll not cut lens flares cuz I like em:p

[KARMA]

ehy I was already editing with that tag goober:p I just didn't know of it:)