I have yet a need to unwrap something sphere-like… but I’d like to learn. I’ve done it once during a tutorial but it was never explained in detail as to the “why” it was done “this” way.
My concern is how a texture may tile incorrectly at the top of the sphere.
To the best of my knowledge it is to not have a closed sphere… to delete the top vertex, and then create an extruded Edge the comes not to a point, but to say .01. That way I can unwrap without worrying about a closed end.
Can someone offer some insight on this? Either in a form of explaining why and how, or linking me to a tutorial that gives logic to this?
I’ve only done UV wrapping for putting a texture on a portion of a mesh, and not the whole mesh.
For a correct projection on sphere you need distorted image (equirectangular projection) to be used or it will come out distorted in a not so good way. See wiki page . You could construct your own sphere following this max Hammond’s tutorial on Vimeo and apply image to the plane he uses. That should give proper unwrapping, well, properly wrap rectangular image, imo.
Again, imagine if you had a photo you would try to wrap around a ball. It’ll be messy at the upper and lower sides, or stretched in a middle. Peal orange by cutting in parts from top to bottom, going around it. Then you’ll just need to figure math how to project rectangular picture to pealed parts. Shall i mention it’s done already :). And, as it turns out, “map can never fully show the polar areas, since linear scale becomes infinitely high at the poles.”
That’s always been my strategy skoolbus. But rather than leaving a hole I leave a tiny ring of triangles that fill it in. Then those are UV’d separately and mapped somewhere small like in an ice field. Hopefully you’re working on something where the poles can be mapped somewhere within the main texture.
Great stuff, I just created that cylinder from one edge loop of previous sphere, and create a cleaner sphere for UV Mapping. Awesome. The other links were helpful in understanding as well.
BentFX,
So my two options are cylinder and sphere projection when dealing with spheres… attached are my examples… notice how the top portion is always offset no matter which I choose? Is there a trick to make this a perfect square so the tiling of my texture doesn’t look cruddy?
All of which I learn from you all will be used for more organic shapes, I’m just using a sphere as an idea to better understand how to tackle objects the come to a point at the top like a sphere… and I now understand to not have that and to have a slight opening as triangles create nightmares.
