[Fury]

Has anyone made a good looking starfield skybox that shows stars as seen from Sol?

[Droid803]

I have one with the milky way that uses the dual-layered nebula skybox made by HT.
I think ShadowGorrath made it - ask him.

[ShadowGorrath]

They have it, but obviously not using it.

And it wasn't me alone that made it.

[Herra Tohtori]

Here.

http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003500/a003572/

8192x4096 would probably be sufficient resolution for a single spherical texture. This one has a 16384x8192 resolution texture available.

You will want a simple spherical skybox for these ones.

Or, if you want to preserve compatibility with older computers (with maximum 2048^2 texture size), you need to do the following:

-map the texture into sphere in 3d modeling program
-take 90 degree field of view images into all cardinal directions (up, down, front, rear, left, right) and use the traditional skybox approach with 6x2048^2 texture size.

Which ever approach you choose to use, this is certainly possible.

[Thaeris]

I'm going to suggest using Celestia as a base.

http://www.shatters.net/celestia/index.html

Free program, AND it's open source! If you crank up the starfield to the desired level, manage to merge the images from each direction, etc., etc., you should have the ability to generate fairly realistic "skyboxes" for most of the visible regions we're aware of in the Milky Way galaxy. Consequentially, this should also work well with the FS universe.

After you've used the said "base" to generate the skybox, you can apply various filters to make it visually appealing, etc.

-Thaeris

[Cobra]

This one has a 16384x8192 resolution texture available.

[Aardwolf]

Ooo, cool. It's slightly higher res!

[Fury]

I have one with the milky way that uses the dual-layered nebula skybox made by HT.

Could we see this skybox?

They have it, but obviously not using it.

If we have it, I've never seen it. It's possible it was not used for a reason, but either way I'd like to see it.

Edit: Nevermind. Darius says the skybox was horribly pixellated and wasn't on-par with the mediavps starfield or better.

blah

If we had someone on the staff who can remap pofs, I wouldn't be asking specifically for a skybox.

[Herra Tohtori]

Bump.



 

(It's not ready yet.)

[Dilmah G]

 
Herra.
Have my children.

[Commander Zane]

NICE!

[Rodo]

cool! hey maybe you can write a wiki entry on how to make a good skybox... later on, of course ^^

I'd like to give it a shot myself sometime.

[shiv]

*shiv wants!

[Herra Tohtori]

A little request here.

I need a skybox. I mean, just a model. Specifically I need an actual box-shaped model with each side having it's own texture (front, rear, left, right, top and bottom respectively) uvmapped onto it. I have the textures themselves pretty much ready, I just need a POF file to get them in FS2_Open.

Thanks in advance already.

[peterv]

Here you are Herra.

[attachment deleted by Tolwyn]

[peterv]

And here's a spherical one, using a map based on the Nasa's 8192x4096 version. Note that the .dds size is ~43Mb. Obviously someone who can texture better than me can do much better.



http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=a4313875899462c7af924764f9977b1de04e75f6e8ebb871

[Herra Tohtori]

Here you are Herra.

Thanks, but the cube is mirrored... I can probably work with it but it would be significantly easier to have it so that the faces would be non-mirrored when viewed from the inside.

[peterv]

Give me 10'

[peterv]

Here! 

[attachment deleted by Tolwyn]

[shiv]

Mirrored