Procedural Stars

There are a various ways to do stars; this way is without any bitmaps. The advantage is no overhead of a large bitmap and issues with blurring, stretching, etc.

We are applying the map[s] in spheres with inverted normals that contain an entire scene. Geospheres will also do.

All of this is about LOD, personal preference, and the size of the noise. The close we get the tighter the noise threshold settings will have to be. Basically, be aware that the size of the dome, the distance of the sky to the scene, will require you to vary settings.

The smoke setting ... this is what creates that “galaxy cloud” look.

This is our noise in the black smoke channel. Notice how close the noise threshold is, and that we increased the RGB level in output.

The noise in our WHITE smoke channel looks like this:

The gradient ramp is the same in both slots:

The result is a little more complexity:

As an option you could place an opacity bank of clouds as a skydome within the star skydome:

Diffuse [you will of course change the colors to what you like]:


Opacity:

Remember, it’s one inverted geosphere or sphere within another for the 2 level, or just one dome for stars only.