My space test scene...

Hey guys, I thought I would share a screenshot of a scene I made to test out my AI steering behaviour code. I may make this into an actual game after I finish my AI code.

-Jeremy

 

drool

 

That looks great! Don't suppose I could tempt you into doing a brief write-up on the key steps used in creating it

 

Thanks. The skybox is pure photoshop. No images or textures from NASA or anything (good source though). I came up with a method of painting skyboxes that works pretty well for this type of scene (no hard lines).

What I do is create my main tiling starfield background (various layers and bright/contrast settings there, and then the usual offset + rubber stamp or heal tool to tile it), then I create a new image big enough to hold 3 full skybox 'panes' across and up vertically. So if my 'panes' are 1024x1024, my new image is 3072x3072. I organize the panes like this; center is front, directly left is...left, right = right, up = up, etc, so we have a cross of 5 panes. (the snap tools are your friend here so you don't cause seams) Now you have the 'back' pane free-floating in one of the 4 free squares as you will be moving it around as you paint. You are now safe to paint whatever you want in that central cross and it will all match up, then you rotate and move the back pane around as you paint to match all sides. Ta daa. For this kind of scene it works quite well. The starfield is actually a lot bigger and more interesting than showed here too.

As for the other geometry, the usual there. I did add a blue halo to the planet sphere to give the rim glow effect. (I wonder how it would look with real glow?)

That's about it besides a fair bit of tweaking, painting and a wacom pen tablet .

EDIT: If you have a lot of detail that spans fron the left or right panes to the back you may want to increase the width of your 'mapping' image to allow room on either side to place your back pane for direct painting. Same for top and bottom so you would end up with a 4096x4096 image. And I also left out that you take the selection tool and set it to fixed size at 1024x1024 to extract you panes after editing. Again snapping is your friend.

-Jeremy

 

Thank you for the write-up. Since I know next to nothing on the art side, for "the usual" on the other geometries, does that mean that you create the geometry in a modeling package (Maya, C3D, etc.) then add the texture and import into Unity (or add the texture in Unity)? I guess the planet is just a sphere in Unity. Also, how do you add a blue halo?

 

The "usual" is creating the geometry in XSI (or whatever) assigning some sort of basic texture projection to the asteroids (I such at UV mapping, so I usually use the basic projections such as cylindrical and tweak it slightly), then I export from XSI to fbx, import into Unity, and drag my texture on to the objects. Yes, the planet is a sphere in Unity with a normal map but I could have made a sphere in XSI and imported it into Unity if I wanted. Like if I wanted the sphere to be higher-poly.

For the halo, just select the object you want to 'haloize' (sry a bit goofy, didn't sleep) click Component->Rendering->Halo and then tweak the size and color in the inspector. I also have two directional lights in the scene. One to provide the main light from the star cluster and nebula, and another one facing in the opposite direction that is very dim to properly simulate the lighting as there are several bright areas at the sides, top and bottom of the skybox. (you can only see the front pane in the above image)

-Jeremy

 

Thank you for the pointers, I think it is starting to make some sense

 

No problem. Any more questions feel free to ask. I will be doing more with this as well, I want to figure out how to do several effects in Unity like nuclear flashes, galaxies, and so on. Probably the next thing I will add is a good lensflare and billboarded nebula-ish clouds to get a good parallax scrolling effect to help give the illusion of extreme scale more oomf. I am going to have to get my hands dirty with shaders for some things which I am not much looking forward too...

-Jeremy

 

I have done the exact same thing. When I say exact I mean it. I wonder how you got rid of the corner distortion? That was the problem I had. I matched the seams perfectly but you could still tell it was a box based on the distortion in the corners. My "How cool is the additive-multiply shader?" thread uses this skybox and I have not found a good method of countering the distortion. What did you do? Or is this just a angle that you cant see a corner?

Bill

 

The link to your space dust test is dead btw (http://www.notics.net/bane.html).

You can partially "see" a corner in the above shots, but I will post a corner shot here. The trick seems to be just how you paint it. It seems to work the best if you have dark space in the middle of the corner itself and sweep your nebula/whatever partially through the corner, but not in a straight line. If there are any hard lines or areas of detail in the corner they will distort. Sort of hard to explain, but take a close look at the image below and you will see what I am talking about. Also if your images are random enough around the corner in terms of direction, etc, then it won't really be noticable anyway.

But the actual blurring and streaking of my textures right in and slightly before the corner area is really weird. The fix in this scene is just not to have any hard detail in that area, go more for smokey nebulae and make sure the FOV of the camera is large enough (65) so the skybox doesn't take up more of the screen for each tile, but it's weird. Anyone know why the texture blurs and streaks like that even before the edge?

-Jeremy