Sky Dome

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For a brief description of this sky dome (or skybox but it was not a box), it was made using 3 "layers":

Layer 1: The Stars

This was the outer and biggest layer in world size, it's just a big half sphere mesh with a pretty twinkling stars material in it.

The concept had this big spots in the sky that resembled a cleaner and stylized version of how space can be seen from earth in some places at night, but in broad daylight.

Adapting it to the shader, was very simple to do, just masks and deformations and a multiplier that made stars appear more inside of it and less outside!

The cross shaped stars were just a very big niagara particle system that spawned randomly.

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Layer 2: Clouds

This was the hardest part, mostly because it took a lot of iterations to finally get to the painterly feeling and also be dynamic!

The final iteration was basically 2D textures of 3D clouds rendered in zbrush and treated in photoshop and then used in a niagara system that was rendered to a horizontally tiled render target, and finally used into a lit material in a very big dome mesh.

Layer 3: Floating Rocks

In the game, the floating rocks were not in space. They were in the "planet's" atmosphere so they came after the clouds. These rocks were made from 2 particle emitters:

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Small Rocks

Small rocks where also normal mapped 2D GPU particles. I rendered them in zbrush and used them as a sprite sheet. To fake the atmospheric distance perspective, the rocks were bigger in the middle of the sky.

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Hero Rocks

Actually 3d modeled rocks that were way lower in the atmosphere and were way rarer to spawn.

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For the Spire below, the same principle as the 2D rocks were applied, the only difference is that it was fixed huge planes far away!