- Joined
- 15 Aug 2009
- Messages
- 3,511
- Age
- 33
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
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