Texture Mapping Help, Please

[CABAL]

I just had a thought of the, "It's so simple, why didn't we think of this before?!" variety. When any of us make planets (which is rare) we make them as a simple sphere and just map a square texture to it. Very basic. However, this results in distortion at the poles, which is very noticeable from the usual top down perspective. My thought was, why don't we make the planets as cubes, map them as cubes, then use MS3D's spherify tool to make them round? By actually mapping the poles from the top and bottom rather than the sides the issue should be fixed, right?

As it turns out, the makers of Oolite, a free Elite remake, had basically the same idea and created a tool, which is also free and comes with Oolite, to turn equirectangular projections into cubical projections. The wiki even shows how to use it with some convenient sample pictures derived from NASA's Blue Marble collection. I took one of those and turned it into a 1024x1024 TGA with each side being 256x256. Unfortunately, I don't know anything about texture mapping and I'm not even sure I can do what I want with just MS3D so I need somebody to help out to make sure this actually looks good. Like I said, this should be ridiculously simple, I just don't know how to really map a texture. I've attached the texture to this post if anybody wants to give it a try.

View attachment earthcube.tga

 

[MrVulcan]

Nice idea CABAL,

I gave this a quick try, seems to work nicely

Key point in all of this is that you'll need to use box mapping in order to match the UV map to the unfolded cube texture. 3dsmax has this tool in the UV editor (mapping > unforld). I'm not sure what's available in milkshape.

There are no noticeable distortions in the cube mapping method. My render has an error cause I wasn't careful in positioning the resulting map, but I fixed it after making the demo pic.

Lastly, the spheres are same size in the pic, but spherically mapped sphere (lol?) looks bigger since its closer to the camera, and has a few more polies. I'd suggest a cube with 9x9x9 divisions for better results. I used 7x7x7

Spoiler: Quick Demo

 

[Rifraf]

Oh wow. It would be so awesome to have planets that actually don't looked warped at the poles. Great thinking Cabal

 

[CABAL]

Thanks, MrV, that turned out great! I'll grab Oolite later, use the tool to convert some of the planet textures in FO and see if I can work out a fully MS3D process for mapping. Should make for quick and simple pretty-fication.

 

[Terradyhne]

Thanks, MrV, that turned out great! I'll grab Oolite later, use the tool to convert some of the planet textures in FO and see if I can work out a fully MS3D process for mapping. Should make for quick and simple pretty-fication.

Maybe this works for FO but not for normal A2 and if you want those planets to be colonizeable!

 

[Atlantis]

It can work if you have the "visual" sphere not selectable, with a "real" (stock) planet just inside. ;-)