nebulae.dat texture options

[rogeroger]

I discovered a site with some free hi-res nebulae and general space textures. This is an example of a nebula that I replaced in mission 4 which included an extra planet as well. I had to edit it to match the rest of the scene.
The large planet will either have to be sharpened to bring it forward or the smaller planet blurred to push it back.


old nebula

the new




This is just an example of the image quality. There are other good nebulae images available as well.

[Ace Antilles]

@Forceflow is working on new Planets as seen in this thread
https://forums.xwaupgrade.com/viewtopic.php?t=14172

Nebulas will be looked at too in the end

[rogeroger]

Planet image upgrades is good news. The planet image on the 'News' page looks stunning and does seem sharper than the current planet images.

I'm on mission 4 with the current install and I think I've got as far as mission 8 on previous installs before becoming distracted by real life or other stuff. I've never been a fan of the mission 4 nebula and it is great to be able to change it to suit my bad taste before moving on to the next mission. Ray tracing has been a game changer for me, so I hopefully see myself completing the missions this time and then loading up the 'x-wing vs tie' missions which I have already downloaded.

I enjoy messing around with textures so I will probably continue to change things as I go.

Thanks to the team for all of the hard work so far and the modding tools, and I look forward to the next update.

[Ace Antilles]

Planet image upgrades is good news. The planet image on the 'News' page looks stunning and does seem sharper than the current planet images.

I'm on mission 4 with the current install and I think I've got as far as mission 8 on previous installs before becoming distracted by real life or other stuff. I've never been a fan of the mission 4 nebula and it is great to be able to change it to suit my bad taste before moving on to the next mission. Ray tracing has been a game changer for me, so I hopefully see myself completing the missions this time and then loading up the 'x-wing vs tie' missions which I have already downloaded.

I enjoy messing around with textures so I will probably continue to change things as I go.

Thanks to the team for all of the hard work so far and the modding tools, and I look forward to the next update.

You are free to submit new nebulas. We will be using 2048x 2048 size in the future.
Some effects can be improved with the mission editor settings.

What I don't know for sure is if any particular nebulas are designed for particular missions.
You can also check out the work done by TFTC to see if any of those nebulas work in XWA missions.

[rogeroger]

I will probably change all of the Nebulae as I progress through the missions and I will upload the resulting Nebula.dat as well as any interesting images I come across.

Thanks for the info.

[Ace Antilles]

I will probably change all of the Nebulae as I progress through the missions and I will upload the resulting Nebula.dat as well as any interesting images I come across.

Thanks for the info.

Cool. As I said we are going HD so make sure you have a good large image.
We have ways to make it load faster coming.

[Forceflow]

Looking really nice. If it's something to be included in the XWAU we will need to know where you got the images from so that they can be properly credited.

[rogeroger]

That will not be a problem, I will provide the site and the artists.

[rogeroger]

Hi Forceflow, great work on planet backdrops so far.

I downloaded a planet image at 9000x4700 lifted the planet and created a replacement texture for planet 6073-2.png at 2048x2048 with the following results.






And a lower res version of the original image


Here is the site for these images. I'm sure you'll find it useful.
You can download at various resolutions but I suggest you download the original size which is the highest res.
Search for planets or Nebulae.
https://www.goodfon.com/search/?q=planets&page=2

[Forceflow]

The planets all have been replaced already by us. So at most we could think about adding planets which thankfully is now possible.
We could certainly use some additional nebulas, but keep in mind that those need to blend with the existing starfield.
One large issue I see is that the page does not appear to have any official licensing information about the images. I would be very hesitant to add anything that doesn't have that information attached to it. Not to mention that the page does look like it's more of a collection of images found on the internet rather than a true artists site. Though with the user agreement being in Russian I am really not sure what I am looking at.

[rogeroger]

I noticed that some images are on moderation and some are approved. I assumed that it was a copyright check but it could just be a standard of quality check.

[Bman]

You could also check SketchFab.com or even search for YouTube videos on "how to make professional looking _____ in Blender" or in a particular paint program like Gimp, Photoshop, illustrator, et al.