Monster's manic gadgets - Starmap bakery and Starbox

Hello Blenderheads,

Here is a new manic gadget from your Prof. Monster.

This time I want you to grab for the stars … This is much easier (theoretically) when you can see them.


Prof. Monster presents:

The STARMAP BAKERY

to create your own STARBOX

The Starmap bakery allows you to create a random star map texture. You can adjust the input channels and bake it to a texture to get some nice stars.



Never forget to save your skymap to file after baking. Otherwise it gets lost.

I used a 3x2 UV texture wrapping. It is not a default one, but save a lot of texture space.
The starmap needs to be pretty large to allow high detail background image.

The bakery contains a little demo that allows to watch the generated skymap in action by applying it to a skybox.

  • Hover over the 3D window
  • press P and
  • turn the camera with the mouse.
  • Esc to exit.

Skybox from library
The bakery comes with a ready-to-use skybox. After baking and saving the skymap to file the group Skybox shows your skymap. I suggest to save the StarmapBakery under a different name (e.g. Starbox.blend), that it persists the assigned map within the blend. Then you can directly link the skybox from that file.

  • Open your game’s blend.
  • Go to File/Link
  • Navigate to your saved Starbox.blend / Scene / _starbox.lib and
  • click [Link from Library]

Now you can add a starbox to your scene via

Shift+A Group Instance/Starbox
[short: shift+ags]

You can parent the instance to your camera, to avoid seeing scaling effects or to leave the skybox area.

Skybox without library
If you do not want to use the above library you can append the Skybox mesh or Skybox object from the bakery. This way you get the UV-coordinates, but you need to apply the sky map texture manually.

Maybe you find it useful.

Monster

Attachments

StarmapBakery.blend (479 KB)

this is exactly what i need for my spaceflight template.

ok, i have generated my first starfield and it looks ok. there are some things i would like to mention. in space you can find red giants and also little blue suns. also some stars give a yellow light. if it is not too much work, maybe it might look even better when you give a few of the stars a light touch of colour.
i have made a png sprite which may give it an extra kick. it has some sort of corona around it.


Yes, this is a nice idea. Unfortunately I have no idea how to add sprites to the texture. I created that method to get a simple star map that looks a bit as it does when we look at the sky (without the atmospheric flickering).

What it basically does is to render a noise texture which looks like an awful lot of stars (way to much for my needs).
Then it subtracts a cloud texture to cancel large areas of stars.
Then it subtracts another cloud with much more density. This removes a lot of the stars that stay closed together.

You can indeed add some color noise/cloud whatever. That creates colored stars. I got them by accident. But I do not really need them. Therefore the focus was on a few small white stars.

It’s beautiful .

Great work Dr.Monster

i have tried it on my template and it looks great. even without coloured stars. use a starmap of the size of 4096x4096 so i masked the baked output of your generator and deleted all black stuff. than i made 4 layers with gimp and a black backgroundlayer. i turned the layers 0, 90 180 and 270 degrees and got a very nice looking starfield.

maybe i write a java that creates a starfield even with some coloured stars. not that hard to do. the only problem i have got is that i dont know how to save the canvas in java.