Outer Space and Nebula Creation

[Solnicaris]

Hi Everyone

I am very new to UDK development and just have been playing around and watching some videos. I haven't seen any docs or tutorials on how to create a outer space scene or nebula effects in UDK.

Does anyone know of any tutorials on this so i can get some ideas or maybe just some tips on how I would even begin? I mainly wanted to create a scene that I can move around in and populate with planets/asteroids and a nebula. i wanted to make a small movie or game if I get enough knowledge behind me


Thanks for any assistance.

[Rives]

Well, It may be a shot in the dark, but I reckon you can create a nebulae with a particle system. Planets are pretty self-explanatory: spheres with diffuse, specular, normal maps. And the Universe would be a big-*** sphere with a star map. That or you can use another particle system to generate the stars, but that would be a bit unrealistic.

[MadV]

This should get you started: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS8vDVCHF9c

[danimal']

You're probably thinking about it wrong. Most outer space effects are really 2d, you'd simply place a nebula on a plane. Accordingly, what you really want is to find Photoshop tutorials on those subjects then apply them in 3d. For instance I made a galaxy following a Photoshop tut on galaxy creation, then modified it slightly for my needs (I skipped the step that faked it looking 3d, and left it in 2d form, and then made a slightly bulged plane instead). Here's the result in UDK:

[shot]http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/2671/capturemj.png[/shot]

Just look around for Photoshop tuts on space subjects, and modify them accordingly.

[KazeoHin]

In Arahan Crown, I used a spiral galaxy for a large section of the skybox. I had to learn Maya particles and run a simulation to get it to look any good. I rendered it to a large .bmp and colored it and scaled it down to 2048x2048 in photoshop. Took me quite a while. As for planets, I created two, one earth-like and one mars-like. I used spheres in maya with subtle displacement maps and rendered seperate fog volumes for the atmospheres. I combined the sets in photoshop and resuized the immages to 2048*2048

[shot]http://sites.google.com/site/kazeohin/Shot6.jpg[/shot]
[shot]http://sites.google.com/site/kazeohin/Shot7.jpg[/shot]

[danimal']

Heh you can definitely do that too! In case you don't have access to $4k software, here's what I mean, they're for Photoshop but there's no real reason you couldn't do it in Gimp to keep it free:

http://blog.hexagonstar.com/galaxy-tutorial/
http://www.presidiacreative.com/out-...d-inspiration/

For things like the planets, almost all 2d planet tutorials will have a step to put in shadowing, you obviously don't want to. They'll also "spherize" the texture to make it round appearing, again, don't do that since you'll be putting it ON a rounded object and thus don't need to fake it. The concepts in most of these tuts is sound though for creating the 2d texture itself. For things like planet haze/glow, see the tutorial the guy posted above with a planet shader.

[MadV]

Also, here's a brief article on how the EVE Online team made their planets.

http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=724

[stevenchau]

this is my real 3D Earth Planet !