June 24, 2013
Category: News
Author: Charles
Space Skyboxes
Recently I came across Alex Patterson’s Spacescape program. It creates space skyboxes by building up layers of stars, billboards (special stars, galaxies or other external images) and noise (for gas and nebulae). These can then be exported as a standard 6 skybox images each up to 4096x4096 resolution. All this under the permissive MIT License. Definitely worth checking out if you are developing a space-based project.
This could be very useful in Concealed Intent. However, there are a couple of issues to be noted when importing the resulting images into a Unity skybox. For more details see the Unity Texture documentation
- Spacescape and Unity use opposite conventions for left and right skybox images - put the left Spacescape image in Unity’s right skybox slot and vice-versa.
- All images should have their wrap mode set to clamp in Unity. Otherwise the seams between images will be visible.
- The default max texture size for Unity is often set to 1024 (at least it was for me). If Spacescape has produced images at higher quality be sure to update Unity to get the full resolution image.