Star field bitmap production

Purpose & Scope

In this document we are referencing to methods we used ourselves to generate nice looking star field pictures. The targeted audience are junior game developers and graphic artists.

References

GIMP star field tutorial: This is the one tutorial we sticked for eventually. It gives most consistent results as clouds show around star heaps. If you want extra cloud without stars you can always go back to the stars layer after generating the star glow layer and remove some stars. You can also use multiple star glow layer to obtain the desired effect.

The key points of that tutorial are:

• Use Filter / Noise / HSV-Noise (4;0;0;190) to generate random stars.
• Use free selection tool (SHIFT+F) to create empty space between star heaps.
• Duplicate the star layer and use Filter / Blur / Gaussian Blur: 15px to generate the clouds.
• Use Colours / Colour Balance: Shadows: -100;0;40; Mids: -100;30;40; Highlights: -100;30;40 to change the clouds colour.