P-172: Unity: Space Environment: Part 2

I was able to use the excellent freeware (MIT License) program “Spacescape” to create the skybox backgrounds for this scene. It is my go to program for all space backgrounds. It is capable of creating high-resolution skyboxes very easily. There is a good tutorial for it HERE. It can also be used to create starfield, without nebulae.

What I especially like about it is that it exports the actual images from the program natively (it even has a “Unity” option that can be selected). The way I used to create skyboxes before discovering this program was to create a large image in an art package, then use that to texture a sphere in a modelling tool. I would then place a camera in the center of the sphere, and take six renders from that camera, rotating it by 90 degrees after each render, so that I get a square image for each side of the sky box.

This worked ok, but it wasn’t ideal, the renders were usually low resolution, and there was often texture distortion on the poles of the sphere, since even with adjustment, the square image didn’t match up properly to the sphere object.

Creating the skybox in unity was very easy, since Spacescape has an export option for Unity. I think it looks quite good, although there is probably a bit too much red, I could reduce that a bit.