Nebulas on Roblox, recommendations?

Hi again , maybe a week or two ago I released my new invention called AtmosphereService, you should defiantly check it out. Well a day ago I though about nebulas, as I’m working on a space game Inspired by pressure and Interstellar I (of course) want my game to look as appealing as possible. But would you guess it, nobody has made a nebula system (not what I have seen so far)

So given the handy tricks I learned about optimised volumetric emulation on Roblox I made this simple test.

Now I could call this a finished product but this looks boorrriiinnnggg so I would like to improve on the design and get some recommendations on what would look better (example: color, replacement for peril noise etc), the performance I’ll handle myself.

Interesting…

You definitely want to look at space art (Yes, this is actually a thing), look at what makes a nebula look like, well, a nebula. Usually nebula are a bright center light source that is casting light on top of clouds, but those clouds are so thick that they quickly block lights, making those dark shapes contrasting with the bright ones. You can go crazy with the colors depending on the grade of stylization you want.

A good rule of thumb is checking the kind of light source (usually yellow or orange, like in the second picture you posted) and make them gradually fade to a darker reddish color, but there’s a lot of nebulae in space with different colors. Here are some examples from a quick Google search:

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As you can see, it’s clouds, clouds, clouds and more clouds, and the coloring is directed by its central light source and how that light passes through. You can go crazy with those!

EDIT: Forgot to say, one thing that really helped me back when I was making space art in another engine was to have a way to block the central clouds by the external, darker clouds. That is the key to give that depth on those gases. It might be tricky to do in Roblox but I think particles have a ZOffset value which can definitely help fixing the alpha sorting. You may need multiple emitters.

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I decided to try and see what I could quickly cook up in Roblox. Not my best work but maybe it can give you some ideas? It’s basically cloud particles with a red to purple color palette, set in different emitters.


Hope that helps in giving you some ideas

Wow! Your demo looks amazing! I’ll defiantly check out some more space art, and I already have some idea on how I can get this to look good!

I sincerely thank you SonokoToume for the recommendations and the provided references, I’ll update whenever I have gotten further :+1:

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