Guide - how to make tiled nebulae
novaWARS has made the transition from closed arena to wrap-around levels. As a result, background space colour needs to be seamless when the UVs are wrapped. I came up with an easy, flexible process for making tiled nebulae from freely available tiled textures found online. Quite simply, extract the noise from a texture as a greyscale mask and apply that to a coloured layer. Layer with 'Screen' blending into the final tile.
There's a wealth of interesting source graphics out there. Initially I used cloud texture, but then hit upon marble with its swirls, and noise textures. Rotating and changing the brightness/contrast tweaks creates multiple variations from each texture, so you don't need many to be able to create a wide range of space nebulae.
