I am trying to setup a simple starry-night environment/background with stars and a moon. What I would like to do is use Blender to generate the stars procedurally, using noise textures say, and then have a moon loaded from an image file sitting in some small patch of the sky. This part is what’s giving me trouble. I can’t seem to find a way to let blender know how I want the image mapped to the background. By default it just wraps it all the way around, which with my particular image results in a completely moon-covered sky. Obviously this is not what I’m looking for. I realize that I could probably edit the image to get closer to what I want, but I was hoping for a more elegant solution.
Is there something like UV mapping you can do for backgrounds to control how loaded images get projected? Maybe by referencing a UV-mapped sphere or something like that?
If all else fails I suppose I could just use a hugely scaled sphere instead of a world background, but once again, not ideal.
Ideas? Someone must have tried to do this before!