So I am making a space game where you travel to many different systems. Now originally I was thinking I would just premake skyboxes. But the problem with that is that if I have say 50 systems, one, thats a lot of work, two, a ton of space making my game file huge. So I was thinking of ways to procedurally generate my backdrops. With some help I came up with two solutions.
Buy pro. I would use render to texture to render billboards of space dust, nebula, planets, ect, on to a base skybox.
Use a few one shot particle system to display these different textures. Problem with this is the particles would have to be farther away from my camera then the far clip plane (so you cant tell there billboards). But obviously things out side the farclip plane dont get rendered.
It makes me sad that I dont have enough money to buy pro right now, It seems I could acomplish my goal pretty easily with it. So does any one has a idea on making my second solution work?
… The only idea I have is to attach a bunch of billboards or a particle system to your camera’s position so you can never actually get to them yet you can still look around as you should. Then have a default star skybox. Then add a bunch of stuff you can get to and it shouldn’t be noticed.
I don’t have anything better for you though…
-Jeremy
The way I’ve done it before is to have a separate camera and a set of background objects in a layer which is only visible to that camera. This camera gets rendered first and subsequent cameras clear only the depth buffer (or nothing, if you make sure your scenery objects don’t need to write the depth buffer… this would be quicker).
The trick is that this camera doesn’t move - it just sits at the centre of the background scenery and matches the main camera’s rotation. That might sound weird, but if you think about it, you can’t move your camera relative to a real skybox, either. This works in the same way.
One other thing: if you’re not moving the camera relative to the background scenery, it doesn’t matter how big the scenery objects are. You can therefore set up your starfield and other objects as a small arrangement off to the side somewhere, so they don’t interfere with the rest of the game scene when you’re working in the editor.
a) I don’t know if this is possible in unity but can’t you just generate a texture by an algorithm on your own (define memory space, set the pixels due to the algorithm, release it as a texture) and use this afterwards?
b) Using different light settings with the same texture pack.
c) Use multitexturing and overlap with clouds at different positions.