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I’m working on a space scene myself right now. I acquired the image I’m using for my space background from NASA. They have tons of images available and they’re free to use (assuming you’re from the states). I don’t know what their policy is for non-US citizens using their images, but for US Citizens it’s free to use. In my scene I don’t have a full rotation on the scene (the camera only looks in about 90 degrees out of 360) so I adjusted the image to look good throughout the motion of the camera and used it as an environment map. This will allow the stars to remain in place and the camera can move without the background following it around. Just map it as a spherical environment.
Because I didn’t go into the image and attempt to modify it so it would correctly warp to a spherical environment, I had to play with the tiling and offset to get the image to appear clearly and accurately (size and shape of the stars). There is likely still some distortion in my background, but it isn’t noticeable for my scene. Likely you would be able to do a similar thing and if you need to have the stars be visible and accurate from every angle, you’ll likely have to figure out a way to distort the original star image you choose to map correctly to a sphere. I’m not certain of a surefire way to do that, but hopefully this gets you on the right track.
See this thread to get an idea of what my space scene looks like.
Author: John Cathcart
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