After a very wordy post about words last month, we’re switching gears back to visuals. This time, we'll delve into the process of layering up our backdrops and showcase a collection of galactic imagery!
Gnarley Nebulas
Most of our backdrops start life as a procedurally generated nebula in Blender. Once we’re happy with the look and feel we output a 32-bit panoramic render at 16k *.
This is a liiiiiiittle bit overkill, but it gives us exactly what we need to work some digital magic before we compress things down, such as tweaking colors and adjusting specific areas to complement the sector layouts.
* No GPUs were harmed in the rendering of these nebulae. They groaned a bit…but thankfully no casualties!
Star Struck
Something we discovered while working on skybox renders early on, is that stars are a real pain. Even at a high resolution stars baked into the background look pixelated and distorted.
You can't have a game set in space without stars though, so for Star Trucker we render these separately using some optimized billboard tricks. This allows us to render thousands of stars efficiently to compliment each backdrop.
Light Fantastic
With our backdrop and stars in place the next step is lighting and post process effects. We do a whole lot of trickery here to create the illusion of depth, and it requires a lot of tweaking. However, the results should hopefully offer plenty of eye candy to enjoy during your long hauls!
Backdrop Bonanza!
Now that we’ve given you a glimpse into how we layer up our backdrops, here's a couple more captures from in-game, focusing on some new skyboxes and sector dressing…
On The Horizon
That’s all from us. It’s a short and ( hopefully ) sweet post but rest assured we’ve got some juicy new info to deliver to y’all VERY soon! ????
10-10 ‘til we do it again
- Monster Dave
