Time for action - populating the sky with stars

There's no better teacher than experience, so let's get some stars in that sky. To get the variety we want, we'll be using nine-point star layers and five billboard star layers. Once we finish with all the layers, we'll do an export to make sure they look how we want them to.

Starting from where we left off, click on the New Layer button to create a new point star layer.
Select the new layer and click on the Move Down button to move the layer down in the stack. We want it to be between the Purple Nebula Ridged Mask and the Purple Nebula Smooth Mask layers.

Change the settings on the new layer to the following:

Layer Name: Dark Purple Stars
Near Colour: 96, 0, 96
Number of Points: 10000
Point Size: 2

Set the Random Seed for Dark Purple Stars to 2573. Make sure to set the Random Seed, NOT the Mask Random Seed. Random Seed applies to the stars; Mask Random Seed applies to the mask that controls star placement. That mask is turned off right now, so Mask Random Seed won't affect anything.
With the Dark Purple Stars layer highlighted, click on the Copy Layer button. This will put a duplicate layer above it. We're going to use this duplicate layer to create some brighter stars in the background layer. Change its settings to the following values:
```
Layer Name: Bright Purple Stars
Random Seed: 6413
Near Colour: 255, 64, 255
Number of Points: 1000
Point Size: 1
```
Just because we're using point stars doesn't mean we can't give the bright ones a subtle halo. To do that, we'll use a second layer of darker, larger point stars with the same Random Seed so that the stars will stack on top of each other. Use the Copy Layer button to create a copy of the Bright Purple Stars layer then select the new copy and click on the Move Down button to put it right beneath the Bright Purple Stars layer.

Change the settings of the copied layer as follows:

Layer Name: Bright Purple Stars Backing
Near Colour: 160, 0, 160
Point Size: 2

We have two more layers to add beneath Purple Nebula Ridged Mask. This time, though, we'll be using billboard layers. Click on the New Layer button and then use the Move Down button to move the new layer just underneath Purple Nebula Ridged Mask.

Give the new layer these settings:

Layer Name: Dark Blue Billboard Stars
Layer Type: billboards
Random Seed: 6457
Far Colour: 127, 127, 127
Max Billboard Size: 0.050
Min Billboard Size: 0.010
Near Colour: 255, 255, 255
Number of Billboards: 75
Billboard Texture: flare-blue-purple1.png

Billboard Texture must be set to the exact string flare-blue-purple1.png or it won't be able to find the file. Spacescape looks in the folder Spacescape\media\materials\textures for the images to use on billboards. There's a decent number of images there that we can use.
Use the Copy Layer button to duplicate the Dark Blue Billboard Stars layer then give the copy these settings:
```
Layer Name: Dark Red Billboard Stars
Random Seed: 4153
Billboard Texture: flare-red1.png
```
Next, we're going to create some stars that will coincide with small, bright nebulas. We'll make sure the stars stick to the nebulas by turning on the masks in the star layers and setting the mask settings to match the nebula. Create another new layer with the New Layer button. Leave it on the top of the stack this time. These are the settings for it. Note that the mask settings are the same as the settings for the Light Purple Nebula, with the exception of the Threshold.
```
Layer Name: Bright Light Purple Stars
Random Seed: 2837
Mask Enabled: True (check the box)
Mask Noise Type: ridged
Mask Gain: 0.600
Mask Lacunarity: 2.100
Mask Octaves: 5
Mask Power: 0.150
Mask Noise Scale: 1.025
Mask Random Seed: 1154
Mask Threshold: 0.650
Near Colour: 255, 84, 255
Number of Points: 2500
```

Use the Copy Layer button to duplicate the Bright Light Purple Stars layer we just made. Change the settings on the new copy as follows:

Layer Name: Extra Bright Light Purple Stars Backing
Random Seed: 3571
Near Colour: 127, 64, 127
Number of Points: 500
Point Size: 2

Copy Extra Bright Light Purple Stars Backing as well. Change the new copy to these settings:
```
Layer Name: Extra Bright Light Purple Stars
Near Colour: 255, 84, 255
Point Size: 1
```

Unfortunately, we can't use the layer copying feature to keep the same mask settings for a billboard star layer. Changing the Layer Type to billboards will remove the mask settings. We'll just create a new layer instead, and put in these settings for it:

Layer Name: Bright Blue Billboard Stars
Layer Type: billboards
Random Seed: 2311
Far Colour: 127, 127, 127
Mask Enabled: True
Mask Noise Type: ridged
Mask Gain: 0.600
Mask Lacunarity: 2.100
Mask Octaves: 5
Mask Power: 0.150
Mask Noise Scale: 1.025
Mask Random Seed: 1154
Mask Threshold: 0.700
Max Billboard Size: 0.040
Min Billboard Size: 0.015
Near Colour: 255, 255, 255
Number of Billboards: 25
Billboard Texture: flare-blue-spikey1.png

That's it for the stars that will mimic the Light Purple Nebula layer. Next, we'll use the same techniques to add stars to the Light Pink Nebula. Click on the New Layer button and open the settings for the new layer. Change these values:

Layer Name: Bright Light Pink Stars
Random Seed: 9164
Mask Enabled: True
Mask Noise Type: ridged
Mask Gain: 0.450
Mask Lacunarity: 2.250
Mask Octaves: 5
Mask Power: 0.150
Mask Random Seed: 1154
Mask Threshold: 0.650
Near Colour: 255, 114, 114
Number of Points: 2500

Make a copy of the Bright Light Pink Stars layer we just made and change these settings in the copy:

Layer Name: Extra Bright Light Pink Stars Backing
Random Seed: 3654
Near Colour: 127, 64, 64
Number of Points: 500
Point Size: 2

Make a copy of the Extra Bright Light Pink Stars Backing layer we just finished and change the following settings to the new values provided:
```
Layer Name: Extra Bright Light Pink Stars
Near Colour: 255, 114, 114
Point Size: 1
```
That's all of our point star layers. We just need two more billboard star layers, and our night sky will be finished. Make a copy of the Bright Blue Billboard Stars layer and use the Move Up button to move the copy up to the top of the layer stack. Then, change the following settings in that layer:
```
Layer Name: Bright Pink Billboard Stars
Random Seed: 7388
Mask Gain: .0450
Mask Lacunarity: 2.250
Near Colour: 255, 180, 180
Billboard Texture: flare-red-yellow1.png
```

For our last layer, copy the Bright Pink Billboard Stars layer we just made and make the following changes to it:

Layer Name: Bright Purple Billboard Stars
Random Seed: 8414
Mask Gain: 0.500
Mask Lacunarity: 2.150
Near Colour: 255, 170, 255
Billboard Texture: flare-blue-purple2.png

Next, click on the File menu at the top of the window and select Save. Save the .xml file. We can load this file later if we want to edit the sky we've created.
Once the work we've done is safely saved, go to File | Export Skybox to bring up the export dialog box. At the very bottom, change the Image Size from 512 to 1024. Navigate to BGP3D/Images then type in Purple for the filename and click on the Save button.

Time for action - populating the sky with stars

What just happened?

The preceding image shows all six of the pictures that Spacescape has output for us, and that brings us to the end of our work with Spacescape. The next step is to take those output images and turn them into a usable sky sphere for Panda3D.