It should be pretty obvious to you that the four planets shown in the intro scene are just texture mapped spheres. The diffuse, specular, and normal maps of the brown planets came from here.  These are some truly excellent texture maps which, unfortunately, are not tileable. However, I do not need them to be tileable. I cleverly rotated each planet so that the texture map seams faces away from the camera. I also used the specular map as a height map so that there is some parallax action going on as well.

For the blue planets, I found a gas giant texture map with the file name of “Gas_Giant_Stock_Texture_by_Enderion.png” here. I do not know who Enderion is, and could not find the original source of this texture map on the ‘net. I always use www.tineye.com to try and find the original creators of found art. But anyway, from the bottom of my heart, Enderion, thank you for this blue gas giant awesomeness.

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I spent a bit of time looking around the Internet for something I could use to easily create a skybox with pretty stars, and perhaps nebulae as well. When I did this in the distant past, I would use 3DS Max and create a bunch of noise maps and layer them and fiddle with the settings until I got something halfway decent. I’m too old for that now. So, I looked around and, lo and behold, I discovered the Spacescape tool which was created by Alex Peterson. I used it to quickly create something that looks far better than anything I could have done in 3DS Max.

It looks great in Unity. Each side is 2K in resolution, which looks pretty decent on my 21:9 ultra-wide monitor that has a native resolution of 3440 x 1440.

I’m imagining that I will do different versions of this skybox, one for each race’s territory. Like the Spemin would probably have a skybox with green-yellow nebulae. Something like that. I do not know yet of Unity can blend between skyboxes, either automatically or by me blending texture maps manually. I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.