• Required Products: None
  

Generate an astronomically accurate night-sky HDR for any place on Earth, any date and time. Real star positions and brightnesses (HYG catalog), the moon with its correct phase and position, planets, the Milky Way, famous nebulae and galaxies, the aurora, and knobs to art-direct sizes, brightnesses and placement. The output .hdr plugs straight into an Environment Dome.

The real night sky, anywhere, any moment in time. Paris at midnight on New Year's Eve. The Sahara under a new moon. Your hometown, on the night you were born or the day you got married — with every star where it actually was. TruSky Nights generates an astronomically accurate, high-dynamic-range (HDR) night-sky environment map in seconds and applies it straight to your Iray Environment Dome.

Stunning realism. Total artistic control. Every part of the sky has a true value and a dial next to it. The moon sits where the ephemeris puts it — until you move the moon where the shot needs it. Its phase is the real phase— until you drag the Phase slider (and press Now to snap back). The aurora sits over the real auroral oval for your geomagnetic latitude — until you pull it overhead for the frame. Nothing here is “realistic mode” versus “artistic mode.” It is one sky, physically built, with the knobs left on.

Over 83,000 real stars, correctly placed and correctly bright. Positions and magnitudes come from the HYG catalog, transformed to your exact location, date, and time. Naked-eye planets sit at their true positions. The Milky Way arches where it should — core, dust lanes, nebulae included. Constellation lines and labels included.

A moon that behaves like the moon. True phase (or dial in any phase), the real surface from NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) images, earthshine on the dark limb, and a disc that occludes the stars behind it. Scale it up to 40× for drama, override its position for composition, and — with one checkbox — add a matching distant light so your scene geometry is lit and shadowed by the same moon that hangs in your sky.

Time travel included. Precession of the equinoxes and per-star proper motion are modeled, so the sky stays true for tens of thousands of years into the past or future — type -13000 into the Year field and watch the pole star change and the constellations slowly deform. Render the sky your ancestors saw, or the one nobody will see for another ten millennia.

Deep-sky and dynamic. Famous nebulae and galaxies at their true positions, meteor showers streaking from their real radiants, and a procedural aurora — all optional, all art-directable, and all rendered only in a dark enough sky.

Fully compatible with DS 4.24 and DS 6.

Below is a list of the installation package types provided by this product. The name of each package contains a Package Qualifier, which is used as a key to indicate something about the contents of that package.

• 1 Core ¹⁾

[ ] = Optional, depending on target application(s)

Not all installation packages provide files that are displayed to the user within the interface of an application. The packages listed below, do. The application(s), and the location(s) within each application, are shown below.

• You can find new icons for loading this product in the following DAZ Studio Folders:
  • “Scripts:RiverSoft Art:TruSkies”

• You can find new icons for this product in the following DAZ Studio Categories:
  • “Utilities:Scripts”

• Scripts included in this product include source or derivative code from one or more of the Scripting Samples provided here:
• Simple Input Dialog
• Simple Image Dialog
• Save Figure/Prop Assets
• Save a Scene Subset
• Save a Wearable(s) Preset
• Extract Figure/Prop Asset Base Data
• Render To Asset Icon
• Render Settings - Find Property
• Create Custom Action
• Element Post-Load Create Callbacks
• List Products Used
• Create Asset Links
• Node Properties
• Save Morph Asset(s)
• Geometry Info

• Data Credits
• HYG Star Database (v4.2), compiled by David Nash / AstroNexus (astronexus.com) — star positions, magnitudes, colors, and proper motions. Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Subsetted and reformatted for TruSky Nights; the reformatted star data file remains available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
• NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter — lunar surface imagery. Public domain.
• SimpleMaps World Cities (Basic) — city locations. MIT license.
• Nebula and galaxy photographs (Photographic mode), used under the licences noted. Each was cropped and star-suppressed for use as a sprite:
• Orion Nebula (M42) — Nico Carver, CC BY 2.0.
• Andromeda Galaxy (M31) — StephenGA, CC0 1.0 (public domain).
• Carina Nebula — Nicholas Jones, CC BY 2.0.
• Lagoon Nebula — ESO / S. Guisard, CC BY 4.0.
• Pleiades — Giuseppe Donatiello, CC0 1.0 (public domain).
• North America Nebula — Giuseppe Donatiello, CC0 1.0 (public domain).
• Rosette Nebula — Dylan O’Donnell / deography.com, CC0 1.0 (public domain).
• Eagle Nebula (M16) — ESO, CC BY 4.0.
• Omega Nebula (M17) — Carsten Frenzl, CC BY 2.0.
• Trifid Nebula (M20) — Dylan O’Donnell / deography.com, CC0 1.0 (public domain).
• Triangulum Galaxy (M33) — Popcorn4life, CC BY 4.0.
• Helix Nebula — ESO, CC BY 4.0.
• Dumbbell Nebula (M27) — NOIRLab, CC BY 4.0.
• CC BY 2.0: creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ — CC BY 4.0: creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ — CC BY-SA 4.0: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. ESO images are used under CC BY 4.0 per the ESO copyright notice (eso.org/public/outreach/copyright/).

• File List

• None

• None