this is a basic tuto on how to unwarp a uvsphere to apply an planet texture.
i’ve searched all over the internet and i haven’t found a clean way to unwarp a uvsphere, so i went to the #blender room and LOD came out with a clever solution.
So here it goes:
1- add a grid
2- unwrap it.
3- put the cursor under the grid (i did 1 blender unit, so it would make a default uvsphere)
4- from the side view wrap (shift+w) 180
5- from the front view wrap (shift+w) 360.
6- all done!!! (select all vertices and remove doubles)
hey paulo_gomes, nice tut. it helped me alot with some problems that I’ve been trying to deel with. Could you provide the pic that you’re using for the earth though please? And also it doesn’t show when I render.
Well he you go…you aksed for it. Nothing fancy but your tut came in very handy as I am working on a multiplane simulated landscape prop that can be used over and over again in Daz Studio. Mapping spheres was becoming a problem as when you got closer to the poles the map was stretching but your way of mapping to a grid first eliminates that and opens up a wide variety of panoramic hdri possibilities that I was wishing for but never thought could be done with the normal mapping, Now the image maps perfectly to each individual face. In fact I am testing your tech on creating tiered cylinders that will be part of the prop as well.
Anyways for anyone wanting to know, in the shot below you have a planet mapped with your technique and then the whole scene is in a sphere that has a star field mapped to the inside (again using your technique). Ambient light is created by a third half shpere (GI dome) and then there are two spot lights to light the ship and meteors (one set to cast only shadows and the other to light).
that looks really cool, and sounds like an animation is coming…
the only thing (i think) would make more sense is the direction of the shadows, if the sun is on the right side your shadows are in the wrong direction.
Nope no animation coming, this was just a test for the prop I was speaking of not a WIP. As for the shadows,lol I just threw in the sun in PSP at the last minute and didn’t even take into consideration the direction the shadows were already going,
with the proper map you can directly lay it on the sphere
whitout UV mapping
have you tried it = its much faster
and you can get map at 4K 8K 16K and even 32K
and you have the choice for almost all the planet in the solar system
This is great for constructing objects as well. I was having a hard time adding detail to a spherical object.
Laying out the detail on a plane and then warping it into a sphere worked great - THANKS!
(select all vertices and remove doubles)
