realistic hires space

[674386b9efcc3miracle.flame]

First thing's first - north.png has to be renamed to stationn.png

Vurt's pngs are twice the resolution RM... and the difference is really markable when you zoom up the stars, they get too big and blurred... also the corners of the skybox are clearly visible, black needs to be more black. Otherwise it is moving forward to its perfection. Is there actually any place where the sun side could be seen?

[674386b9efec7voodoo47]

can't check from work, but I had the same problem with the first version as well - the textures were not fitting together seamlessly. this is something that needs to be corrected.

have you tried to load the textures into Shocked? just get the map from the first post, throw it into some mod folder together with the textures (they need to be under FAM\skyhw\), and load the map via Shocked, you should see the new textures. do make sure to run the editor in some decent resolution and in the hw mode.

[674386b9f0332RocketMan]

oops about the north.  I missed that one.

I didn't realize the black wasn't black enough.  Maybe I can lower the brightness of the entire image until I get 0,0,0 in the black areas?

I tried to fix the seams a little but it can never be perfect due to the issue I raised earlier.  The FOV is fisheyed necessarily because you're looking at the surface of a sphere.  This makes straight lines become curves.  When you try to stitch the end of one curve to another on a pair of orthogonal planes, it will look bent.  If I were drawing these textures artistically, I could just fix it the way I want but because this is a real star field with accurate constellations and everything (check, you can find the big dipper), it's going to be a little messed up that way.  I am open to suggestions but I'm unaware of any way to fix it.

Resolution - I don't have any way to arbitrarily pick the resolution of my image export.  It defaults to screen resolution, which for me is 1280x1024 (actually a bit less because of the active starfield window area).  Again, I'm open to suggestions but I have looked in the software and can't figure out any way to raise the resolution.

The sun is on the bottom panel I seem to recall.

I know it sounds like I'm giving too many excuses for this to be worth it so I'll check it out and if it does suck I guess I'll give up.  I think it was worth the effort to try but I'm really not equipped to do this myself at this point.  I lack the skills.

[674386b9f04b9Kolya]

Which software are you using, that limits image export size to desktop size?

[674386b9f05bfRocketMan]

Starry Night.  It has a function called "export image" where you can pick your file type and compression but not the size.  It just grabs a frame from the screen.  It uses OpenGL.

[674386b9f06c3voodoo47]

ok, just checked, moon looking good, but I'd still recommend flipping the earth, and the seams need to be taken care of.

[674386b9f0846miracle.flame]

I forgot to mention that the Earth is way too oversaturated, I'd suggest to lower it a bit.

EDIT:

Well Starry Night can be limited way to get really high-res screens. Maybe a google search could bring up more useful results.. Here's what I've found so far... and maybe I try to lay my hands on this myself tommorow...

http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003500/a003571/SeaIceNPwStarfield_3840x2160.1447.jpg
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003500/a003525/Sea_Ice_Poster_star_lg.1218.jpg (beware ZB 18000 × 13500 pic of starfield)

[674386b9f093cRocketMan]

If that's an actual view of space from Earth's perspective and you can specify which part of the sky is being examined, then it looks like my google sucks but that'd be good to have. 

[674386b9f0a2eKolya]

Just out of interest, do you know http://en.spaceengine.org Rman?

[674386b9f0b27RocketMan]

No, can't say I have.  It looks like it holds promise.  I'll have to see if it allows greater flexibility with taking screenshots.  Thanks for the link

[674386b9f0c07Kolya]

Yeah, don't know about that, but I read about it recently and thought it might interest you.

[674386b9f0f78Grosnus]

I really liked the idea of more realistic skybox mod, couldn't resist making one myself.
Not sure if it's any better or worse compared to other skyboxes presented here:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13017979/skyscreen1.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13017979/skyscreen2.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13017979/skyscreen3.jpg

Unfortunately unlike RocketMan's skybox, stars in my texture are completely random as the whole thing was composed of various photos and there was no way I could pull that off here.

The file was too large for attachment: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13017979/GSkybox1.zip

Edit: oops I just realised I accidentally put RMan texture as skyt.png but it can be easily replaced by stationt.png.

[674386b9f10ecvoodoo47]

you are missing the atmosphere (bluish outer glow). also, there is a bit of ugly jagginess going on with this particular earth picture (on the right side), it could use a bit of manual tweaking if you want to go with this one. apart from from that, looking good.

also, I'll be splitting this and moving it into engineering in a moment.

[674386b9f1228Grosnus]

I believe in real Earth photos you can't really see the atmosphere from this distance, take a look at apollo 17 pictures for instance.
(I know it's sort of doesn't make sense cause you also wouldn't be able to see the Milky Way the way it is, but...) And yeah there's a little bit of a lower quality happening on the right side, but you have to keep in mind that this particular photo doesn't feature fully illuminated Earth, but I agree that the shadow looks weird.

[674386b9f1323voodoo47]

this is movie realism - sounds in vacuum, space full of stars and nebulai (plural alert), halos and glows. reality is dull, that's why we have movies and games (and rule 34) in the first place.

[674386b9f1445Kolya]

Well space IS full of stars. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/ESO-VLT-Laser-phot-33a-07.jpg

[674386b9f1529voodoo47]

that particular part is somewhat interesting/pretty, but mostly it's just dots on a black background. for the naked eye, that is.

[674386b9f16dfRocketMan]

I like Grosnus' version.  It's believable, it has the Milky Way in it.  It's not 100% accurate but actually I never really cared about that because I'm not going to check to see where all the constellations are.  I just want something that I can look at for 2 seconds and feel that it makes sense and his pulls that off IMO.  Good work Grosnus

My 2 cents:  Put the sun completely opposite the Earth so it makes sense that you can see the entire illuminated disc of the Earth (oops you've already done that).  Put the moon somewhere with appropriate disc illumination.  For Tau Ceti view, just delete the sun (or you could move it since Tau Ceti does have a very similar sun actually) and moon.

Voodoo:  Good call splitting the thread.  I cluttered up Vurt's unintentionally.

The awesome thing about being in space (one of the reasons I hope to go one day) is that there's no light pollution and no atmospheric aberrations so you can see pretty much everything clearly.  It looks a lot nicer than you could ever hope for on Earth.  Time exposure shots are about as close as we can get to seeing everything there is to see but there's nothing quite like being there in person

[674386b9f1b99Olfred]

The awesome thing about being in space (one of the reasons I hope to go one day) is that there's no light pollution and no atmospheric aberrations so you can see pretty much everything clearly.  It looks a lot nicer than you could ever hope for on Earth.  Time exposure shots are about as close as we can get to seeing everything there is to see but there's nothing quite like being there in person

Or you just digitalisize your mind and hack yourself into hubble.

[674386b9f1ca9Kolya]

And use it's lenses to paint crop symbols onto earth's surface. 
[episode-9-nasca-lines.jpg expired]

[674386b9f1d9dRocketMan]

http://x4ashes4ashes.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/signs-2002-shyamalan-44.jpg?w=640&h=348

[674386b9f1f11miracle.flame]

Well Grosnus, your Skybox solved the nebulai and crazy stuff but the Earth is as small as Vurts. It would be so great to expand the Earth beyond single picture and render the skybox textures to make round impression when viewed from station. I have found this supposedly noob Blender tutorial with pre-scripted template to achieve that freely but I apparently suck at following those tutorials in the end.

[674386b9f2003RocketMan]

If the East view were to be filled entirely by the Earth, are there any other places on the station where you can see other views with stars?

[674386b9f20edvoodoo47]

not on station, no. also, you don't really want to deal with the earth stretching through several textures unless you really know you way around skyboxes, or so I've heard.