Seeking insight for planet modeling and texturing
Myself and my programmer friend started working on a space-sim to learn workflows and processes, practice and just show that we can. My experience is in low-poly character and environmental work. We're working in Unreal Engine 4
Initial problem: I want to model and texture planets with minimal pinching and generally equal texel density.
Solution I found: After searching through other cases online where people were trying to fix this, I found that a Quad Sphere was the best solution.
So I created my quad sphere, as well as unwrapping its UV's into a simple 6sided cube unwrap as shown below:
Now my problem is, generating texture maps for this arrangement, there are a lot of tools out there for procedural planetary texture generation, but I can't seem to find any that use a cube projection. This has led me to a kind of informational/educational black-hole.
My primary purpose for this post: I feel quite lost, both in terminology to use for search strings when seeking help for this kind of modeling/texturing. I know there have got to be methods out there documented for some of the more optimal workflows for preparing a sphere model to minimize distortions for a space sim, and then laying out the UV's for rapid work in creating new texture maps.
For example: Now that I have a pretty little quadsphere, I could bring it into zbrush and make myself a normal map for the landscape and that's all well and good, but cooking that out to a heightmap I could use to help with painting the planet's nonsculpted details in photoshop.
I think what I'm saying is: I've lurked on Polycount since 1999 but never got involved, I've always been content with my low-poly hacked together models and processes, but now I'm working with a professional engine and we're making excellent progress, but I want to do this RIGHT, and I'm in over my head, I feel like I'm drowning and I'd love a moment to catch my breath and talk to some other people out here. I tried to keep the post short so that hopefully it won't be trouble to look through.
Also, our temporary little lowpoly prototype ship.
Initial problem: I want to model and texture planets with minimal pinching and generally equal texel density.
Solution I found: After searching through other cases online where people were trying to fix this, I found that a Quad Sphere was the best solution.
So I created my quad sphere, as well as unwrapping its UV's into a simple 6sided cube unwrap as shown below:
Now my problem is, generating texture maps for this arrangement, there are a lot of tools out there for procedural planetary texture generation, but I can't seem to find any that use a cube projection. This has led me to a kind of informational/educational black-hole.
My primary purpose for this post: I feel quite lost, both in terminology to use for search strings when seeking help for this kind of modeling/texturing. I know there have got to be methods out there documented for some of the more optimal workflows for preparing a sphere model to minimize distortions for a space sim, and then laying out the UV's for rapid work in creating new texture maps.
For example: Now that I have a pretty little quadsphere, I could bring it into zbrush and make myself a normal map for the landscape and that's all well and good, but cooking that out to a heightmap I could use to help with painting the planet's nonsculpted details in photoshop.
I think what I'm saying is: I've lurked on Polycount since 1999 but never got involved, I've always been content with my low-poly hacked together models and processes, but now I'm working with a professional engine and we're making excellent progress, but I want to do this RIGHT, and I'm in over my head, I feel like I'm drowning and I'd love a moment to catch my breath and talk to some other people out here. I tried to keep the post short so that hopefully it won't be trouble to look through.
Also, our temporary little lowpoly prototype ship.
Replies
http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/-5gUXxpj5rw/hqdefault.jpg
So you're saying the standard modeling and UV unwrapping technique for non-seamed planetary bodies is a tennis-ball style? Is that similar to what I already have? (Pictured below)
I don't know a better way to put it? Map it where pole pinching occurs, bake out the map to the projection of the primary UV channel (The one pictured below) then I can use photoshop/crazybump to my heart's content?
You might also find eve onlines blog post about their planets useful, the planets in the game look incredible
http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/awesome-looking-planets/