Hi BAers!
I’m having texture distortions at the poles while mapping an equirectangular texture map to an icosphere. Vertices of my icosphere are pretty well spread out, so I think the geometry is fine, and it’s the texture mapping that went wrong.
Details and some screenshots are here: https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/245315/pole-distortions-while-mapping-an-equirectangular-texture-map-to-a-3d-sphere.
I’ve read some very similar posts on this forum and elsewhere. People’ve suggested switching from uvsphere to icosphere to avoid triangular faces at poles, which I already did – my sphere consists of only quads. People also suggested some manual editing for the eyes, but unfortunately I can’t freely modify the mesh for visual purposes, as my goal is to create a scientifically accurate model.
Is there theory or principled way of eliminating such pole distortions brought by equirectangular maps? I’ve read stereographic maps don’t have this problem, but what if I have only equirectangular maps?
Many thanks and looking forward to some responses from the experts here!