Simply drag or instantiate a copy of the star prefab into your scene. Creating a new star from scratch is not recommended. When selecting a prefab, you can select between Manual Color or Scientific Color, and Thick or Thin Coronas. Thin coronas are generally recommended, as thick coronas have a higher performance impact.
You can click on the star to open it's inspector, or change most settings programatically from the 'Star' script. Settings include:
Enable manual color selection - Select to enter a color, or unselect to specify a temperature or B-V value to automatically generate a color.
Paused - When selected, freezes the texture, rotation rate, and particle system. Can be set with Star.Pause(), Star.Unpause(), or Star.TogglePause().
Time scale - How quickly the star's texture and rotation changes in appearance.
Resolution - How 'Zoomed in' the star's texture is. You should change this when adjusting the star's scale.
Contrast - How varied the final texture will be from the base star color.
Rotation rates - How quickly the star will spin in each direction.
Stars can range from 1195 to 113017 Kelvin, or -0.4 to 2.0 B-V. Anything beyond that is not accurate.
This was an intentional design descision. Because of the wide varieties of use cases in scales and lighting, these are left up to the user. The prefabs come with built-in point lights and automatically set their colors, but not distance or brightness. Also note that star textures are always fully lit, so extremely low-brightness stars such as brown dwarves may not appear correctly.
The tool's shaders require complete control over the rotation so that the corona appears to blend seamlessly with the rest of the star's texture. You can still modify the rates at which a star spins.
No, Unity can struggle with large coordinates and scales, which you might see when trying to create space-sized games or simulations. You can read more about this problem here.
Because the stars are procedurally generated and shader based, this means that the surface is constantly changing and the performance is proportional to the amount of screen space that the asset takes up. This will not be a problem for most uses, though on low-spec devices it may lag if the star takes up a significant portion of the screen.
The asset has been optimized as well as possible without sacrificing quality. If you intend to have the stars take up a large portion of the screen, other approaches (texture/particle based) may have better performance, but at the cost of reduced graphical fidelity.
Please post any issues or suggestions on the github Wiki pages. Additionally, feel free to contribute to the Wiki or create a pull request if you end up making changes yourself!
Released January 25th, 2018
-Project is now open source, and free on the asset store! (Sorry for the poor documentation of the source code and repository, this was originally a quick weekend project with no intention of having other people work on it)
Released October 12th, 2017
-Fixed a bug in the corona shader on mobile (Thanks Leo!)
-Improved performance by switching from spheres to hemispheres
Released April 10th, 2017
-Added Pause/Unpause functionality
-Time scale can now be adjusted in real time, and affects rotation rates.
Released April 7th, 2017
-Added this README/FAQ
Released April 3, 2017
-Improved camera controls
-Fixed color lookup tables to make low temperature stars darker
-Allowed overwrite of color/temperature/B-V lookup tables
Released February 2, 2017
-Initial release
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