Feel free to take my Blender scene for creating KSP Skyboxes

[Rocket_Tamer]

Free to good home...

I've read-only shared my folder on Google Drive that contains my attempts at creating a skybox for KSP using Blender. They work but I've run out of steam and want to get back to the game . I am using my latest 4k stars-only v1.5 version at present, which is in the drive folder. There's no limit to the resolution you could create the skyboxes, just 4k was enough for me.

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0BxtVn_bTrSAtfkM5dmYyS3lfLUo4MFZxeVZNUUtDWEdNTllMeW5MTXp3T2JfWUI3Q1d2ckk&usp=drive_web

Hopefully there are some people who know their way round Blender and can perhaps make use of my efforts. I have come up with a way to generated nice star-fields, which with the current settings appeals to my tastes of real-life proportions of magnitudes and colours, with an increased stellar population in the galactic plane and toward the galactic centre.

In the Blender scene the KSP specific cameras (parented to an Empty to keep all six cameras together) each create individual GalaxyTex_*.png files. The square image files produced have proper edge distortion so result in a proper skybox with no distortion at all, which is nice and trumps a fair few other bespoke skyboxes that ignore this. The results can be placed into Texture Replacer's default directory and then they'll be visible the next time KSP is launched.

The difficulty I'm having is getting a good looking 'milky way'. The scene has all the constituent parts in place... the glow of the distant stars, the dust lanes, some star-illuminated dust... but it takes ages to render the dust so I've got impatient as I'm missing actually playing KSP now. The look of the dust takes a lot of playing around with, such as with settings for the force-fields acting on the particles, density and scattering of the volumetric shader cube plus the cloud settings for the shader. On top of that, the images can look great (see the already rendered textures on the Google Drive folder) but KSP ruins the look of the galaxy with colour banding. That said, the star-fields look great in my opinion.

One thing to note about rendering, it is best to run the particle simulation from 0 to 100 and render at frame 100. At frame 100, the force-fields and brownian motion have done their bit at mixing the dust and moving the stars a little bit (making them more randomly placed(?)). Also, to render just a star-field, you would need to turn off the render flag all but the starfield object.

There is a python script for rendering all the six images with the right filenames needed for TextureReplacer in the folder too.

Let me know if you like the skyboxes or find the Blender file useful.

Enjoy.

[Rocket_Tamer]

I've added some example GalaxyTex_xxxxxxxxx.jpeg files to give you a better idea of what the one 4096x4096 skybox face is like. In jpeg form, they are showing compression artefacts, unlike the uncompressed png files founf in the zips.

Edited July 27, 2015 by Rocket_Tamer
Explain about compression artefacts in jpeg files recently added.