Fall Break - What?

Threw together a ship model today. Not particularly good, but it's only temporary and I can keep working at it. I keep getting distracted by other classes, but I think I've got making planet shaders mostly down, and I'm getting close to having a nice looking skybox. I just need to deal with some seams.

 

I was going to go out into the mountains and get some actual textures to replace the terrible crater nodes I've got on these this weekend, but the weather is supposed to be terrible so my buddy with the camera (and the car) backed out. So that will have to wait a bit longer. I might end up using that time to try a couple of other ways of generating the skybox textures that should be seamless. I'm not quite happy with the fallout shaders I've got going on the planets' atmospheres, but that should just be a matter of playing with some nodes.

I've been trying a few different approaches to the skybox so far. The first produced better nebulae, and the second produced better stars. It will be easy enough to combine the two, the stars and the nebulae are completely unrelated to one another.

Look at how much shinier the second image is. Admittedly, the close stars are a bit too big. But at least it's not boring. Now I just have to figure out a way to avoid seams. I can generate the nebula clouds so that they will tile, so if I really can't do it I'll just make one huge map, shove it on a sphere, and take a bunch of renders from inside and use those for the skybox.