As you can see, I need to create 2 layers, a light bottom layer and a dark upper layer crossed by a glaring sun. (the stars are going to be scatter objects, but if you have any ideas on how to make them as a background, that would help.) everything is fine except the glaring sun. I have attempted to use gradients and scale and tried to sub with an actual recolored sun texture, but have had no luck. I also don’t know how to make a blur effect that is also there.
you know anything that I don’t, please leave your ideas.
It is not quite what you want but could give you ideas, it would be hard to get it “exact”.
I had a go with the nishita sky. I used 2 sky textures one inverted to get the light at the bottom and rendered out an equirectangular exr. I put some stars in for fun! All this had to be done in cycles, in eevee the nishita sky does not work and has no equirectangular camera
Then I used the exr as the environment in another file (that way it will work in eevee), with Suzanne in the scene to see how it lights.
I moved the hdri a bit with the mapping node. I also added a lightpath node to control the darkness of the visual hdri and the amount of light it casts separately.
I gave the eevee render settings a bit of bloom, and colour management high contrast.
The sun disk in the second scene is a sphere with an emission shader set to strength “40”
Here are the files if you want to take a look. You will have to render out the first file to save the exr to use in the second files world environment node. SkyHdri.blend (103.7 KB) skyhdri2.blend (159.0 KB)
It has been fun!
Edit I turned down the “visible” hdri a bit to make the sun disk more noticeable.
Edit2 I just realised I left stars on the lower half!
