Need help with texturing a Quad sphere for a basket ball!

SimãoSilva

Hi, I've trying to texture a basketball, i started out with a simple quad ball, unwrapped it using the tennis ball method and then I baked out the normal maps from an high poly, up to now everything was looking good, but now I'm stuck, I've been using a stamp i created to make more details on the normal map but the problem is i cant get them to tile, every time the seams are visible like this:

here are the wire frame and normal map so you can see what i looks like.


i have been thinking about warping or some kind of distortion but i don't know!
I appreciate all kinds of help !
Thank you in advance! ^^

Mark Dygert

Perfectly straight UV's on a quadsphere will have distortion. The only way to get around that is to relax the UV's which makes them a little harder to pack and you might get some aliasing issues from lines that where previously made of straight rows of pixels (like the seam down the center) but now curve. 

It's all a balancing act. The important thing is to remember at what distance the object will be viewed and how important it is in the grand scheme of things.

There are a lot of tricks to get rid of that seam, but often it's not worth the effort or it involves an undesirable tradeoff. Can it be solved and made perfect? Sure. But what is the cost, and do we really need to do it? 

Personally I think the micro details running roughshod over the traditionally blank seam is a bigger issue. But then again if you step back both might be insignificant...

SimãoSilva

well it is for a fps but i guess that with color and all other things distracting the player its not noticeable, I've kinda gotten around it with just lowering the intensity of those details,!

Sorry to ask this but English is not my native tongue, what does roughshod mean ? And what did you mean with that phrase? i really didn't understand sorry !

Thank you very much for the help !

ActionDawg

I solved this a while back in perhaps an interesting way.



Since it's so simple, I just modeled and unwrapped a highpoly basketball. Results in UVs with practically no distortion. Then (in Substance Designer) I went pretty hardcore and made a generator for the bumps that distributes them the same totally random way they do for a real ball. I made a worldspace or triplanar generator for the black paint wear, can't remember. This is what my normals looked like:



Did the entire material on the high. Lastly I simply did transfer bakes to a low poly quadsphere identical to yours. I can't find those textures though, but the results are seamless.

Edit: I also wanted to mention that this method has another benefit in addition to matching the randomness of a real basketball's bumps. With SD not only could I place them randomly, but also use the black seams to generate a cutoff mask for the bump generation.

SimãoSilva

That seems interesting! somedoggy but the problem is that i don't hvae access to substance where I'm working and i got do this by hand in Photoshop, I'll need to figure out a easy way to warp the texture so that all the dots match and there are no seams, but thank you very much for the help ! ^^

Eric Chadwick

What 3d software are you using? You could try baking a procedural noise texture with a cellular pattern. 

SimãoSilva

Eric Chadwick i am using 3ds max, is it possible to do it there ?