Process

Drawing, painting, or rendering should be done either on a sphere or cube map, preferably on a sphere map. A sphere map is simply an image twice as wide as they are tall, with resolutions that are a power of two(256,512,1024,2048...), that will be projected onto a sphere durring the background-generating process. The image may be as large as you like.

Desired Things

Any rendition of the galaxy or locations shown in HW1 can be useful, from old or new viewpoints. A nicer version of the green enviroment in the Homeworld:@ examples, and other places within that enviroment, would be immediately useful, or similar locations with the 'outside galaxy' obscured.

Examples

Homeworld:@

These are in proper sphere-mapped format.

Homeworld 1

Extracted Homeworld backgrounds. The extraction process is terrible and the formatting is not entirely suitable for import into 2.

Homeworld 2

These are in proper sphere-mapped format.

Other

The page is currently lacking clean exports from HW:C

Astronomical references

• Omega Nebula has interesting high contrast lighting.
• This might be useful for the whorls inside a nebula.
• The Tarantula nebula is one of the best nebulas, but it's also the hardest sort to really render inside HW2.
• The Orion nebula has a lot of color.
• This one has a large number of the dense, dark, gas pockets.
• This one is good for demonstrating that if the nebula gas is BETWEEN your line of sight and the sky, it occludes the starfield. On the left of the central star, we only see the stars BETWEEN us and the nebula. To the right, we see PAST the nebula.