GarryStellar V1.0 can be downloaded at the bottom using the button below.

Night skies in AC have always been static skydomes which don't move and don't really add anything to the world around you. GarryStellar is the first shader which gives you a night sky that's actually alive with a bunch of effects that move and light up the world around you. It's a night sky shader for Pure that has auroras, nebulas, a black hole, real constellations, shooting stars, every planet in the solar system with their real moons and rings, your own custom planets and a bright star you can place anywhere, and all of it is animated and highly customisable.

GarryStellar runs through the Shaders tab in Garry's PPFilter App V0.12, which is included in the download along with Garry's App Hub V0.12. It works with any filter, and everything you set saves into your PP-Filter app presets so you can download and share presets freely in the app. Every effect in the shader has its own tab down the left of the shader card with its own switch.

There are 13 tabs and I go through them in order in this post.

1. Aurora

The aurora is on by default.

Shapes

There are 2 aurora shapes: Sculpted Ribbon and Magnetic Folds. Each shape keeps its own settings.

Magnetic Folds

Sculpted Ribbon

Colours

There are 5 colour presets: Default (turquoise at the bottom, blue, then violet at the top), Natural (greens running up into teal), Neon (magenta, purple and cyan), Ice (deep blue up to white) and Ember (crimson, orange and gold). Custom lets you set your own low, mid and high colours, and the colour assistant underneath can fill in the other two from whichever one you set, in tight, close or soft groups.

Settings

Everything else about the aurora can be changed too, from the shape of the curtains, their height and the rays to how they move, and quality goes from low to max.

2. Star Field

The star field is GarryStellar's own star effect and is on by default. You can change how many stars there are, how big and bright they are, and blend between 4 star shapes.

Colour modes

There are 8 colour modes. Static is a plain colour, Twinkle has every star flickering on its own, Pulse fades them in and out, RGB Cycle runs through every colour, Chase sends a bright wave through the stars, Fire is embers chasing round, Ice is icy blues drifting and Strobe blinks them on and off fast. You can also make up to 8 of your own.

Warp streaks

Warp streaks make the stars stream past you as you speed up, out from wherever the car is heading, similarly to how the after image stuff works for glare. It's off by default.

3. Constellations

There are 16 real constellations: Orion, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Cassiopeia, Cygnus, Lyra, Aquila, Scorpius, Sagittarius, Leo, Gemini, Taurus, Canis Major, Pegasus, Crux and Centaurus. They sit where they really are in the sky and move with the night.

By default they all share one style and if you want you can give any of them their own style.

Draw your own

You can also draw up to 8 of your own constellations by clicking the stars into the sky.

4. Shooting Stars

Shooting stars come in 2 styles: Fireball (a big slow fireball leaving a smoke trail) and Meteor Shower (quick thin streaks mostly coming from one spot in the sky).

There are 9 colour modes. Physical Random gives them white heads with a hot orange tail like real ones, then there's Fixed White, Blue, Violet, Emerald, Gold, Ice, Rose and Mixed Palette, where each one picks its own colour, or you can make your own.

You can also set how many there are, how fast they go and how big and bright they are.

5. Nebula Layers

Layers

You can stack up to 4 nebula layers, each with its own shape, colours and settings, and you can copy a layer to any of the others.

Shapes

There are 5 shapes and each one has its own settings.

Lanes

Bright stripes of dust with dark gaps between them, which you can break up into clouds or round off into bigger pockets.

Clouds

Soft billowing clouds that drift across the sky and slowly change along their edges.

Filaments

A foam of thin glowing walls round dark pores. This is the default shape.

Turbulent Sheets

Two creased sheets with a channel between them, which bend apart and back together.

Ribbons

A few thin silk ribbons on slow waves, which shine where they turn towards you.

Settings

Each shape has its own settings that can turn each shape into something that looks completely different from the original. Every shape also moves in its own way, and you can change how fast and how much it moves.

Colours

There are 3 ways to colour a layer. The first is Painted, which has 8 presets: Violet, Orion (blue and rose), Carina (warm and gold), Lagoon (pink), Hubble (teal and gold), Warm Dust, Ice and Emerald, or you set your own outer, core and dust colours. The second is Scattering, which colours the thin dust one colour and the thick dust another, with presets like Blue and Rose, Violet Dust, Teal and Gold, Ember and Ice. The last is Split which runs bands of colour across the shape that go white where it's dense, in Blue and Violet, Copper and Blue or your own colours.

6. Black Hole

You can place the black hole anywhere in the sky and it stays there as the night goes on. It's off by default.

Stages

There are 11 stages: Orange Dust, Thin Gold, Thick Amber, Blue Clouds (with jets), White Hot (a small disc spinning fast), Embers (slow, dim and red), Glacier (ice white near side, smoky amber far side), Amethyst, Emerald and Silver, Crimson and Ice and Moonlight. Automatic drifts through six of them on its own. You can also make your own stage with your own colours, size, spin and jets.

Settings

You can change alot about the blackhole, like its size and angle and how fast the disc spins, how it bends the sky around it and other stuff like the size of the dust streaks that are getting sucked into the hole.

7. Planets and Moons

You can have up to 14 planets in the sky at once and you can place each one wherever you want. They're off by default.

Real planets

You can pick The Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus or Neptune, and each one comes with its real moons, rings and tilt. Mars has Phobos and Deimos, Jupiter has Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, Saturn has its 7 big moons from Mimas to Iapetus, Uranus has its 5 big moons and Neptune has Triton. You can switch each moon on or off, and they orbit the planet.

Custom planets

You can also make your own planet as a rock, gas giant, ice or earthlike planet, and each one has its own surface, weather and other characteristics:

1. Earthlike has things like water, ice caps, deserts and grassland, cities that glow at night, moving clouds, sun glint on the sea and auroras round the poles. All of these things can be customised.

2. Rock has craters, young craters with bright rays round them, darker plains and dust storms.

3. Ice has older ground showing through the ice, craters, mountains, frost, ice storms and geysers.

4. Gas giant has bands, turbulence, storms and a red spot, with the bands sliding past each other.

Custom planets also can have rings in 4 styles and up to 8 moons, and you can make any of those moons your own too.

Phase, colour and air

Every planet has its own size in the sky and brightness, and its own phase. The phase can follow the sun like the real moon, stay fixed at however much of it you want lit, change night by night over as many nights as you set, or come from the bright star.

You can tint any planet with 12 colours: Silver, Pale Gold, Harvest Orange, Blood Moon, Rose, Ash, Smoke Blue, Amber Haze, Copper, Ivory, Lilac and Steel, or you can pick your own.

Air gives a planet its atmosphere (the moon and Mercury don't have one), which is the bright crescent and glow you see when the light is behind it, and you can change how thick it is and its colour. The moon also has earthshine, the faint light on its dark side. You can also tilt every planet towards you and every planet has a spin control apart from the moon.

8. Bright Star

The bright star is a star you place in the sky, and it lights up your planets and nebulas. If you put it just past the edge of a planet you get the backlit crescent shown above.

It comes with 3 default styles: Blue Giant, Red Giant and Pulsar, and you can make your own. It's off by default.

9. Lighting and Glow

This tab holds the controls for light shafts and bloom for all of the effects.

10. Sky Tint

Sky tint colours the night sky with a top colour and a horizon colour, which can also move and cycle through colours. It's off by default.

11. Sky Light

Sky light is what lights the track and cars, and it's on by default. It measures the light coming off the nebulas, the black hole, the aurora and the sky tint, and lights the world from the part of the sky that light is coming from in the effect's colour. It also shows up as highlights on your paint and on wet roads.

12. Scene and Quality

This tab sets what sunangle GarryStellar fades in and out at and how the effects show in reflections,. It also has the overall quality settings, which goes from low to max.

13. Settings

This tab has general settings like the live previews in the tiles which you can turn off if you're on a slower PC. It also holds stuff like remember placements per track which keeps where you've placed the black hole, planets, bright star, meteor shower and nebula light on each track.