Skip to main content

StarCanopy

The sky of a place in space, baked for your game.

StarCanopy generates skyboxes for space games: a nebula of billowing, lit cloud, the galaxy's band and its stars, around the player, as a cubemap in linear HDR that any engine can load.

You pick a sky from a seed, look around it at your game's field of view, and steer it with a handful of controls that describe the sky -- more open or more enveloping, brighter or more brooding. When it looks right you export it at full size, turned to face the way your scene needs.

Status

Skies render from the command line: starcanopy render turns a project file into OpenEXR, KTX2 and PNG, steered by thirteen macros. The interface is to come. The whole is a work in progress.

What it makes​

  • Nebulae with form. A thick mass of cloud lit by one cluster of young stars, so most of it turns from the light and its shape shows; bright ionisation rims; fine lumps catching a grazing light; and distant nebulae beyond it, lit from beside, dimmed by the dust between.
  • A galaxy seen from inside. Its band, its dark rift and its spiral arms; its stars at real distances, each dimmed by exactly the gas in front of it -- some in front of the nebula, some inside, some behind -- and open clusters among them. Where in the galaxy you are is part of the sky.
  • Colour from a palette space fitted to measurements of admired skies: every sky is of their kind without copying one.

See the gallery for skies it has made, each with the project file that makes it again.

How it is made​

Every change to StarCanopy's look is decided by a blind comparison scored by eye, at a game's field of view -- never by a number or a whole-sky map. The principles it keeps are in PRINCIPLES.md, and what it refuses to become in NON-GOALS.md.