realistic hires space

[67436166a9402RocketMan]

Unrelated but that blue nebulous cloud in the background is quite jarring.  Never would you see that from Earth's vantage point.  Instead there'd be a ton more stars.

[67436166a959bvoodoo47]

I know. anyone willing to create a proper star background as seen from earth is encouraged to do so.

[67436166a969aRocketMan]

I might take a stab at it.  I remember the last time I tried I ran into some technical difficulties but I'll have another look.  It just looks wrong to have clouds in space IMO.

[67436166a9775voodoo47]

23752 people think it's fine, but sure thing, take stab at it.

[67436166a9897Kolya]

Milky Way.

[67436166a99afRocketMan]

If you're referring to the hazy band you see on the clearest nights, yes, I absolutely agree with you.  In fact in an earlier post I rendered a scene showing the milky way edge on.  However the current skybox shows something very different.  I'm sure my keenness for detail in this case doesn't represent the majority but for my own sanity, I should at least try to offer an alternative that's perhaps less attractive but more accurate.

[67436166a9b01voodoo47]

once I grow up big and smart, I'm going to make a photorealistic sky background with earth that will spin around every 24hrs game time.

[67436166a9f55ZylonBane]

Unrelated but that blue nebulous cloud in the background is quite jarring.  Never would you see that from Earth's vantage point.

I don't care for it, but because it's obviously the output from a fractal or caustic filter.

btw, I chose the current earth size purposely - made it just big enough to look nice when viewed from the first station room.

Nice, IMHO, would be the Earth filling the screen. If you look at photos from the ISS, it's apparent the Earth should be much bigger than a single skybox panel. The only reason I didn't make it larger for the ADaOB skybox set is because I didn't want to deal with the skybox distortion.

[67436166aa04bvoodoo47]

yeah, but the goal was not to make it realistic, just to make it shiny glowy sparky. that part was a success.

[67436166aa150RocketMan]

No need for sarcasm Voodoo.  This isn't about ego, I merely have a different point of view and wouldn't think to undermine the author's artistic or technical prowess.  I'm just going to take a stab at it and upload the results.

[67436166aa22dvoodoo47]

no sarcasm intended. if you make something that looks/works better, I'll update the zip right away.

[67436166aa3a5RocketMan]

Ok so I did my best and came up with the necessary skybox frames but I'm a bit unsure about how they need to be arranged and require a double check by someone.  Voodoo, I take it you have some experience working with these skyboxes.  Did I get it right (apart from the placeholder filenames)?

Note that apart from 2 of the textures containing the sun and Earth/Moon, the rest can be re-used at Tau Ceti.  The sky is 99.9% identical there.  Also I had to capture the images at 1024 resolution so I couldn't get any better than that unfortunately.  If it looks like shit, I guess I'll give up but if it's ok, it could be a "realism version" or something for people who want it to look as close as possible to a real sky.
[skybox.rar expired]

[67436166aa4f9voodoo47]

I can imagine this will be too lowres once the really high resolutions start to be more common, but it looks decent enough in fullhd - with the exception of the moon, there is some weird jagginess going on, you should try to get rid of it if possible.

also, any particular reason why the earth is upside down?


//adding a lame picture showing how the textures should be oriented to form a proper skybox.

[67436166aa645RocketMan]

The moon - didn't notice.  I can try to replace it with a better looking moon
The earth - 2 reasons:  First, the light side of the Earth had to face the sun else it wouldn't make sense and second, no reason why the Earth has to be upright in a zero-reference environment so I figured why not.
The layout - your diagram makes perfect sense.  Is this not how I arranged it? Granted I didn't name them properly.

[67436166aa741voodoo47]

no, the default files didn't form a proper skybox, and I was too tired to rearrange myself (and the files are probably not final anyway).

most people are accustomed to the "proper" earth position, but you are the author, so whatever you like/deem fit/ make goes.

[67436166aa821RocketMan]

Ok I'll see which ones don't fit and re-arrange.  Thanks.

[67436166aa904ZylonBane]

These are getting saved as DXT images when it's done, right?

[67436166aaa99voodoo47]

yes. as there is no nebula stuff going on, the compression artifacts will be non-existent.

bottom texture 90 degrees counter clockwise and top texture 90 degrees clockwise looks like it could work, but it's still not seamless, or so it seems. maybe I'm just tired.

[67436166aabdcZylonBane]

Nebulas would actually compress pretty well under DXTC. It's high-frequency detail that it mutilates.

[67436166aaea8Kolya]

Koresh Teed, dig us a hole and get us out of here!

[67436166aafcfRocketMan]

ZB I know absolutely nothing about DXT.  Are there any special things I need to know or is it just another file format?

K, had to look up the name but I see what you're talking about now.  Lol, what a quack.

[67436166ab0d9voodoo47]

to make it short, work in a lossless format (png is fine), and once you are done with the textures, we'll convert them to dds to not piss off the dark engine too much (while NewDark does support lossless textures, as they are not compressed, they can fill up your video memory really quick - remember the first version of TG hd mod).

[67436166ab21aRocketMan]

My mistake was to make North the center of the cruciform.  If I do as you suggested, I can center on East, correct.  The alignment should be fine but by fine I acknowledge some minor distortion because we're mapping points on a sphere to a cube.  My software looks at a 90 x 90 FOV, which means I can cover the entire sky but the edges don't stitch correctly because each FOV isn't orthogonal.  I'm not aware of any way to fix this inherent coordinate mapping issue but it should only affect the milky way haze, which is fairly tenuous.  I'll have another version in a moment.

[67436166ab304RocketMan]

Ok this might be an improvement.
[skybox.rar expired]