I’m trying to create the moon using these NASA textures https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/details.cgi?aid=4720 following this technique https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8ZagRMwP7Q but for the life of me I can’t get it to work, there’s still pinching at the poles. Is there something I’m missing? I’m following the tutorial exactly.
Use generated texture mapping instead of uv and set your texture image display to sphere as in the example pic.
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This is just a Mercator moon photo/map (again, courtesy of NASA) as the material for a UV sphere. No shaders. I had to go looking for the polar anomaly. Of course, no relief it’s just painted on a smooth spere. Did the same for Mars and Mercury.
I wonder if you could create a patch to cover the small area of the polar region and paste it over the anomalous area. The next trick then would be to find undistorted pole photos. (I.e. duplicate the sphere, grab a few squares from the equator of the duplicate and delete the rest. these squares match the curvature of the wedge-shaped polar area but can hold a photo undistorted.)
I had to deal with the moon few years ago. it was with blender 2.59. using an addon for importing DEM elevation maps from the nasa also link. It was intended to wrap a picture of it on an inflatable balloon for Melies cinema in montreuil (france) with a fuller projection(icospheric one).
for me the idea was to recast the 8 million triangles mesh on an icosphere using bake from this geometry. It was pretty efficient.
Perhaps you could use this technique to create your undistorded map.
but as you can see here… in the next picture the way the addon map the dem squares on the subdivided sphere, generate also triangles elongations.
I’ve kept this file if you need it. It was not the higest resolution that you could import with the addon, but it’s a quite heavy mesh. 356Mb
But i’m sure the datas are available on nasa server link. And as you can import whatever you want with blender… not so difficult to find a brand new dem importer…
or reuse 2.59 again.
But if you need a more simple shader, i ve also done a really good pancake.
Anybody there?
last call for boarding…