[TUTORIAL] Sphere maps

hessi

I took the time to create a tutorial on how to make sphere maps. As i was confronted with this problem recently at work (a game engine/renderer that didn't support cube maps :S) i had to figure out a way to render a scene as a sphere map with Maya.



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EarthQuake

A really easy way i found to do this is to just make a quad ball, unwraped to standard cube map uvs, and then create a sphere, unwraped to whatever uvs you like, then just use xnormal to bake the texture from one object to the other. Or any app that supports baking maps from one mesh to another.