I have created a number of very high resolution space skybox environment cube maps that are available in the Unity Asset Store.
Here is a video preview of one of the spaceboxes called “Stellar Dust” which comes in 8 variations: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLCQOWh_Ec0
As a Unity user you get all the variations shown in the video for $15 (in the asset store) which is a 90% saving compared to buying all the variations on spacebox4096.com.
Here is another another preview of a spacebox named “Planet Eclipse”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJcYvyxMEt8 also priced at $15 with the optional planet and solar flare.
Each spacebox material is created using 6 seamless textures where each texture has a resolution of 4096x4096 pixels. This allows high quality even when you change field of view (FOV) to zoom. Search for “spacebox” in the unity asset store to find all the spaceboxes.
You can preview all spaceboxes (video and Unity Web Player) on http://www.spacebox4096.com/spaceboxes.html but buy it from the Unity Asset Store instead of the official site to save a lot of $$ =)
Great looking skyboxes. Would be even better if they could be generated procedurally, or came at lower resolution. 300 MB per skybox can add up very quickly, and downsampling them manually often results in visible seams.
Great skyboxes, nice job. Side note… I just bought your latest album “Chillout” after hearing the tracks in your skybox demos. It’s fantastic music to play while I’m coding.
Well regardless of how they were made - I don’t really see why that’s an issue - they seem very good. The “Planet Eclipse” is particularly good. Incidentally, I own a Pro license for FilterForge, and I still plan on buying one or two of these because it would take me a lot more than twenty minutes (which is how much time I could afford for the price of these) to come up with something which - frankly - would still not be as good. So regardless of which tools are being used, the tools are being used well, and the result is good, and at an excellent price.
@Retronamic - All the spaceboxes are actually created in Photoshop. I mainly use Clouds and Inverse Clouds for nebulas, and for the stars I created a program in BlitzMax to distribute the layers and density of stars the way I wanted. Some nebulas and dark matter regions were created using the cloud maps from this site Natural Earth III – Clouds which are free to use. The planet is also created from scratch using various photos of textures I’ve taken and I plan to make more planetary spaceboxes as soon as time allows.
A lot of time is, however, spent on making the spacebox seamless in all directions for the cube map - that is also done manually for all 6 textures. A spacebox takes me roughly 10-15 hours to complete with many iterations of layering in Photoshop (my PSB files are up to 5 gig =) …and then I spend another couple of hours to make the demo videos and unity packages etc.
I wonder if it was Spacescape I had a look at before I opted for a manual approach. I didn’t quite yield the result I wanted but it may have been another piece of software designed to render nebulas and stars. I’ll revisit it though.
