I’m trying to recreate this image as a 3D sphere. When I unwrap my UV sphere and place the image on the face layout, it comes out very warped. Also, when I try to redraw the grid, it does not come out as straight lines on the sphere. How can I texture a sphere with this image? Alternatively, how do I unwrap the polys so that I can draw a simple grid and texture my sphere with that? Thank you!
-w
lots of ways to do this. Without unwrapping you can use edge render and set edge settings Eint way up and it’ll show all edges, the more common way is to duplicate the object and scale up a smidge and then do the outer object as a wire render and the inner one solid.
To unwrap a sphere try spherical projection “sphere from view” while looking at it orthogonally in 3D view. Then just use the script to save UV layout as an image and when you go to paint it use that layer as the top layer and set to darken and when you reimport the map the black lines are already painted for you (I think that you may want to dilate and blur first thought).
The project sphere from orthographic view will give you about 90% of the sphere in a grid layout, but you will get extreme distortions near the poles. If you use the smart projects, you can get a more even layout of sphere parts that will produce a less distorted UV map upon final render. It is not as convenient to paint, however.
This may be possible, but I am no UV wizard but wouldn’t it be nice if Blender could take existing coordinates, say from project from sphere. And transfer, not only the UVs, but the actual image map itself to the new format? So you could unwrap as project from sphere, paint in 90% of the grid in photoshop, apply, then unwrap again in smart projection and finish out the last 10% with less polar distortion.
There is a lot of distortion near the poles on a sphere-mapped sphere. Most projections of the earth make Greenland look as big as Australia. However, there is a ‘poler coordinates’ filter in Photoshop and Gimp that, when set ‘polar to rectangular’ will convert and end on image of (say) the north pole to a map of the north pole used for sphere-mapping on Blender.
You’ll have to do this once for each pole, though.
