eonite opened this issue on Apr 18, 2009 ยท 89 posts
eonite posted Sun, 19 April 2009 at 12:14 PM
Thanks Bijan, much appreciated!
Aquiavic, this is an interesting question. Have been thinking about it for a while.
One option would be to have HiRes renders of the skies created in Artmatic. This would provide the same background.
Another option would be to map those elements onto alpha planes so they can be shifted around to fit the scene.
The third option, which I find the most satisfying in the long run, would be to create entirely new skies from scratch in Vue.
The starfields, nebulae etc. would be generated by (procedural) materials mapped onto one or several planes.
The moon/planet textures would be mapped onto spheres and the foreground stars would be generated by using point lights.
Below you can see a picture I rendered with the camera placed 40meters or so above a horizontal plane that uses 3 layered materials. To create the stars and nebulae I used the same techniques used in Artmatic (procedural, not bitmap).
As you might guess, the stars in the foreground are point lights placed in between the camera and the plane.
It rendered extremly fast. It not perfect, too bright. Just a render of an experiment.
Have also tried to place the plane vertically far away 100km so an infinite terrain can be used without being cut off by the plane and it seems to work.
Will need to make more tests. When this method works, then similar results like the one in the Artmatic Voyager SciFi/Alien Sky set can be achieved in Vue (which would be fantastic!).
Any suggestions?