detail texture in skybox?

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mp303

detail texture in skybox?

Post by mp303 »

I was wondering, is there a way to customize the materials, e.g. to use a multi-layered material, in a skybox?

The thing is, even with huge (1024x1024) bitmaps, stars (little white pixels) in a skybox look terrible - especially when using JPEG compression for size.

So what I was thinking is, you could use lower-resolution JPEGs for nebulae and such, because they're already smeared and will look fine as JPEGs, and then apply a tiled detail texture over that, with the stars on it - since there'd be nothing but stars (e.g. white/gray dots on a black surface) on this map, it should compress away to almost nothing e.g. with lossless PNG compression.

Any thoughts on this?

Do I have to code my own skybox routine?

Or would it be a better idea to use the existing skybox for the low-resolution JPEG nebulae, and then simply plot the stars myself?