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Seeking Starfields


Wingnut
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Hi Gang!

 

I am looking for free cubeTextures (skyboxes/reflectionTextures) of reasonably-real-life-accurate starfields.  In other words... I am looking for skyboxes that accurately portray real life night skies.

 

I prefer to have high-detail and low-detail versions.  (heavy cluster and light cluster)

 

If anyone has such, or knows where I can get them... (possibly for use in our playground)... then please reply.  Thanks!

 

I am also interested in folks who know about generating random starfields... via shaders (if possible).  Can stars be generated on the background of our BJS scenes... without using skyboxes?  Shaders? 

 

If someone DOES succeed in building a shader-based starfield generator, then random star-twinkles, shooting stars, moon stuff, and ISS/airplane fly-overs... gets you extra credit.  :)

 

Thoughts welcome, from anyone.  Thanks!   Party on!

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I don't have any accurate ones, but I do know of a project that generates really pretty ones:

 

http://alexcpeterson.com/spacescape

 

Then there's this:

 

http://stars.chromeexperiments.com/

 

I'm not sure how it pulls off all of it's tricks, but it clearly has all the astrometrical data you want. It also appears to have a rendered skybox with what looks like a low to medium texture that should be exactly what you're after.

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Thanks for all the leads, gang!  Spacescape doesn't work on my computer.  It keeps crashing at startup, no matter the compatibility settings.  But, the "100,000 Stars" demo has paid-off to some degree.  Although its skybox is not your average night sky, it IS accurate.  In trying to get usage permissions... I talked to Michael Chang (author of 100,000 Stars demo), who referred me to Google's Val Klump, who showed me that the 100,000 Stars skybox is actually a shareable wiki commons picture.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ESO_-_Milky_Way.jpg

 

I don't have the skybox textures in a CORS-ready folder yet, and I'm not exactly sure how to use Macguyvok's Gist->RawGit CORS work-around method with 6 textures in a single folder.  AND, I didn't ask Deltakosh to create textures/skybox5 with these images (to put them in CORS-scope of the playground)...

 

...but I made a skybox from it... on my buddy's webserver.  Have a look!  Here is the zipped version, too!

 

Thanks, gang, for all the help in finding this "starbox".  It looks like we are all free to use this... according to the wiki commons licensing.  I am still interested in even more starboxes and stardomes, so if you have urls or demos... I would love to see them.  Thanks!

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  • 10 months later...

Hi A!  Do you know about layers?  http://playground.babylonjs.com/#1XQKP1#8

(yeah, yeah, it's an unusually-blue greenbox.)  heh

It's not exactly a skybox, but it's still not too bad.

To get CORs-clear backdrops, I might do a Google Image search for 'stars', and then press the "search tools" button and choose Usage Rights = > Labeled for reuse.  That gets me a few wikimedia commons images to play-with (always COR's cleared).  When you DO have a COR's failure, there is no indicator in the PG... the image just doesn't load-in/display.

But yeah, a couple of starfield skybox 6-packs (cubeTextures) would be cool to have in playground scope.  I think the cubeTextures I used in the example... are genuine stars... and they are pretty, but I think there's too many "clusters" and "gas clouds".  *shrug* 

Generally, I think one or two should be color (and maybe more 'in your face'), and one or two should be black and white, and more subtle.  Thoughts?  There's SO MANY styles of starfields... it could get out of hand quick.  :D

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But yeah, a couple of starfield skybox 6-packs (cubeTextures) would be cool to have in playground scope. I think the cubeTextures I used in the example... are genuine stars... and they are pretty, but I think there's too many "clusters" and "gas clouds". *shrug*

Generally, I think one or two should be color (and maybe more 'in your face'), and one or two should be black and white, and more subtle. Thoughts? There's SO MANY styles of starfields... it could get out of hand quick. :D

Have you got the beginning of next month's Babylon challenge?

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:)

 

@john  -   Umm... this is probably the wrong place for this, but I'm not a fan of the "Babylon Challenge" and I think it should be called Raanan's Challenge.  When contest organizers and judges post the "winner", they also post the many non-winners, and that is a perfect way to hurt a user's feelings and discourage them from further use of BJS. 

 

In general, you'll never see me condone or promote competing.  John, I liked your post because you promoted "let's all find and show cool starfield methods" (including particles and procedural textures)... but as far as a "contest"... that's not my cup of tea.  There's too many differently-qualified folks on this forum... to do competitions.   Besides, this place is called a "commune-ity" and not a capitalism.  :o  

 

I much-prefer we participate side-by-side (nice and level) and NOT in a "get-a-leg-up" or "get ahead" pyramid-climbing race.  Pyramiding crushes the kids on the lower layers, just like the sure-to-collapse childhood playground versions did/do.

 

Heavy, huh?  If anyone wants to do further "grinding" about competing vs. cooperating... meet me/us in The Wingnut Chronicles... we'll debate there... if anyone wants to. 

 

Meantime, let's see... procedural texture star fields.  hmm.  *scratch scratch*  We could get twinkles and shooting stars... from a shader... because we have the ever-changing 'time' variable being auto-magically sent to our shaders (whether they use it or not).  hmm.   Party on!

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  • 10 months later...

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