StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I hate starfields that are bland, sparse, grayscale affairs, and I'm not real fond of huge nebulas in every damned scene. And where's the milky way? Where is our beautiful galaxy?

Basically, I want the holy grail of all sci-fi backgrounds, a starfield as seen from space. Ideally, it'd be 6 square images to be placed on a skybox. That is, a box that encloses an entire 3D scene and follows the camera so that the camera does not move relative to the starfield.

It's easy enough to find random astronomy images, but finding anything that's zero zoom, or indicates what arc of sky it displays, or looks on your monitor like it would to the naked eye...I don't even know where to begin. My google-fu is weak, guys.

In a real picture from space, you'd be hard pressed to see even the brightest stars without washing out whatever else is in the picture, unless you do it from a location very far from the sun. And then you have the problem of your eyes not being able to see any but the brightest of stars in color.

Do you have Photoshop? If so, here's a fine tutorial on how to do nice star fields (and also cool planets, somewhere on that site).

Just remember that if you're making six images to place on a skybox, you have to compensate for perspective and create it distortions to make it look spherical (ie the stars toward the edges must be bigger), otherwise your space will look cubical and weird (or you can use sphere mapping if your program supports it).

Dooey Jo wrote:Do you have Photoshop? If so, here's a fine tutorial on how to do nice star fields (and also cool planets, somewhere on that site).

Just remember that if you're making six images to place on a skybox, you have to compensate for perspective and create it distortions to make it look spherical (ie the stars toward the edges must be bigger), otherwise your space will look cubical and weird (or you can use sphere mapping if your program supports it).

Hey, That´s nice. Thanks for posting it.

Here's a site that goes into pretty rigorous scientific study about what color stars really are.

Alan Bolte wrote:I hate starfields that are bland, sparse, grayscale affairs, and I'm not real fond of huge nebulas in every damned scene. And where's the milky way? Where is our beautiful galaxy?

Basically, I want the holy grail of all sci-fi backgrounds, a starfield as seen from space. Ideally, it'd be 6 square images to be placed on a skybox. That is, a box that encloses an entire 3D scene and follows the camera so that the camera does not move relative to the starfield.

It's easy enough to find random astronomy images, but finding anything that's zero zoom, or indicates what arc of sky it displays, or looks on your monitor like it would to the naked eye...I don't even know where to begin. My google-fu is weak, guys.

A realistic starfield as seen from space would be pretty much like a starfield you'd see in a night sky on Earth, except the stars wouldn't twinkle, you'd be able to pick up stars as faint as magnitude 6-7, and the space around the stars would appear black, rather than deep blue. The stars themselves would appear, generally, as a faintly bluish-white color, except for the brightest. The Milky Way would appear as a diffuse glowing cloud of diamond dust. In short, up the blue slightly on those bland grayscale starscapes, and you'd have a reasonable approximation of what a starscape would look like from space.

All this, of course, assumes that you're standing in a dark room. The only thing you'd see in a bright room would be all black, with the rare star-like point representing the absolute brightest stars and planets, or a nearby spaceship.

You would also see a lot more stars, since there's be less pollution, light pollution and atmosphere pollution, to get between you and the stars. There would be hardly any differences from what you can see from a good middle-of-nowhere vantage point on earth.

Of course that's all also pretty much stating the obvious.