Making stars in space.

Hi!

Have anyone a draft concept of making stars in the background?

- Using a skydome with a texture, would repeat the texture. Especially when using large skydomes.

- Using 3D objects (sprites, models, ...) and put them randomized in the space? For a good look of this it must be thousands.

Both ideas have the disadvantage of jitter the stars when you moving the camera. That problem is clear to me, rendering a viewfield of thousends of quants to a 640x480 viewport causes this.

And how do I prevent them from disapearing by the far clipping range?

- Another idea was to copy a part of an large bitmap to the background of the current rendered buffer. (= Clipping?)
If this part has the size of the current screen resolution this must be looking good!? Copy the part of the bitmap in dependency on the current oan/tilt/roll angels.

Any other ideas?

Chris

Do you want to be able to move past the stars? you must be travelling at far beyond lightspeed then

In any real situation the stars wont be moving past the camera.. so the best way is probably to use several skyspheres (just a sphere model set to a sky model) set to bright, and you could then rotate them very slowly to give an impression of movement. Also, you can have nebulae and galaxies too this way.

No, I do not move the stars, if I move/rotate the camera I have the jitter.

Chris

you could also try particles. these look good, because they can be small, but bright dots this way.

skysphere works nice.



you can add additional elements that will be closer by using sky entities ( the planets are all models in this shot though)

or with a skydome a benifit,( sphere and dome not same thing) use just a simple generic star texture for it, is you can add a little .u .v shift it will make the stars twinkle, but your limited to the half dome with engine over 6.22.

Not sure why you will get 'jitter'..but anyway, the best thing then is to simply define a skybox, which is six textures mapped onto a hollow cube..you can render the skybox textures in a program like Bryce. Skyspheres are easier to render, but do not map correctly..so they are to be avoided in most cases.

the older lithum unwrape does a great job of mapping a sphere models polys without gaps making using a rectangular image easy.
its best to use a mesh generated with modelers like Milkshape because it makes evenly sized poly faces through the mesh... some programs make elongated triangles near the poles.

Have you tried the "Vertex's Space Flight Workshop" located in the Tutorials section of the Acknex Unlimited site? (http://au.conitec.net/)

It's a little old now, but I have had excellent results with the techniques that are taught in the tutorial.

I usually use one sphere for all the background stars, one or two more with specific celestial phenomena on it, and I think the final results look great.

- WildCat