Volumetric Nebula

Opens via Editors › Volumetric Nebula.

Configures the volumetric nebula renderer. Unlike the classic nebula in the Background Editor, the volumetric nebula is rendered as a true 3D volume with light scattering, emissive glow, and procedural noise shaping.

Key fields

Field	Description
Enabled	Adds the volumetric nebula to the mission. Uncheck to disable without losing settings.
Model	POF model that defines the outer boundary shape of the nebula volume. The mesh must be watertight; multiple disjunct meshes are allowed as long as their polygons do not intersect.
Position (X, Y, Z)	World-space position of the nebula volume.
Color (RGB)	Primary color the nebula is rendered with.

Rendering

Field	Description
Opacity	Target translucency - the maximum opacity the nebula reaches at full depth. Cannot be set to 0.
Opacity distance	Distance in metres a viewer must be inside the nebula before it reaches its target opacity.
Render quality steps	Number of steps used to accumulate nebula density along each ray. Higher values reduce banding on objects inside the volume; primarily affects frame rate.
Resolution	Resolution of the nebula's 3D density texture, stored as a power of 2 (5–8 recommended). Higher values cost more VRAM.
Oversampling	Oversampling factor for the 3D texture (1–3). Each increment quadruples loading time but reduces edge banding, especially at lower resolutions. Primarily affects load time.
Smoothing	Controls how softly the hull POF's edges blend into the surrounding nebula. Expressed as a fraction of the nebula size.
Henyey-Greenstein coefficient	Controls light scattering direction. Values greater than 0 produce a cloud-like shine-through effect; values less than 0 produce a highly reflective nebula. Practical range is roughly 0.05–0.75.
Sun falloff factor	Scales how the sun's illumination falls off with nebula depth. Values greater than 1 make the nebula's interior brighter than physically accurate; values less than 1 make it darker.
Sun quality steps	Number of steps taken toward the sun per nebula slice when computing shadowing. Higher values reduce light/shadow banding; primarily affects frame rate.

Emissive

Field	Description
Emissive light	Intensity of the emissive glow added by light sources inside the nebula. Higher values produce brighter emissives.
Intensity	Controls how quickly an emissive light source widens inside the nebula. Larger values spread the glow more broadly even where there is little nebula to obscure it.
Emissive light falloff	Corrects emissive alpha near the source. Values greater than 1 darken the emissive close to its origin, producing a more even spread; values less than 1 brighten it near the origin, making it more intense at the center.

Noise

Procedural noise is layered on top of the base volume to break up uniform density and create wispy internal structure.

Field	Description
Enable noise	Toggles procedural noise on or off without losing the noise settings.
Color (RGB)	Tint color applied to the noise layer.
Scale base	Size of the primary noise layer in metres. The ratio between Scale base and Scale sub should have a large denominator to avoid visible harmonic patterns in the result.
Scale sub	Size of the secondary noise layer in metres.
Intensity	Overall strength of the noise effect.
Resolution	Resolution of the noise 3D texture, stored as a power of 2 (5–8 recommended). Higher values cost more VRAM.
Set Base Noise Function	Not yet implemented. Will allow a custom ANL noise expression to replace the default base noise layer.
Set Sub Noise Function	Not yet implemented. Will allow a custom ANL noise expression to replace the default sub noise layer.