koobas.hobune.stream
map of earth on material (sphere) is distored - Why?
OK, I want a sphere with the standard NASA unwrapped image of earth, that you can find everywhere - for example this one
I'd like to do other planets too. These images are in a 2:1 proportion.
When I attach this to a standard material as the albedo map, the result is very distorted - the poles are just tiny (Antarctica for example.)
There seems to be no way to make this thing map properly, and there is just zero documentation or information I can find on how unity maps to spheres so that I can get it to look right!
I cannot be the only person who has ever tried this before...
So, how in the world does Unity's spherical mapping work, and how to create a texture image that will properly map on a sphere?
Seems to me that any such texture will properly map if you set the UVs up right. You'd need to know what projection was used to create the image. I think the place to start would be to research things like $$anonymous$$ercator and Peters projections, the setting-up is going to be easier for some projections than for others. But I dare say someone else will be able to provide much more concrete advice.
Well, it seems they changed the UV map and mesh structure of the default sphere mesh. I don't really understand why they have choosen such a strange alligned unwrap (at least for the top and bottom part): UV set 1 UV set 2.
The new sphere mesh is made up by a cube mesh which has been spherified (an old project).
The "old" sphere mesh (can't remember the version of Unity) has a quite nice equirectangular projection except the center vertex at the poles where merged to the center of the upper / lower edge. This was made with the "old" default sphere mesh of Unity and i used a similar image.
So like @tanoshimi said you probably have to use your own sphere mesh with an appropriate mesh layout and UV.
That's an equirectangular projection. You can't apply it to the standard Unity sphere, but it's trivial to setup the appropriate UV map for a sphere primitive created in Blender, say. See http://www.enigmatoots.co.uk/#!unwrapping-sphere/cvnq , for example.
Hey many thanks to you all.
Sure it's trivial, but it does require many clicks before you can get a mapped model into unity.
Seems strange that they would choose an underlying representation for this fundamental primitive object that would make more difficult to map to.
@Flash$$anonymous$$don: As i said above, the old sphere mesh had an equirectangular topology and UV-unwrap. Now it's not a cylindrical projection anymore. The mesh topology now represents a cube mesh, but the unwrap is still layed out like a cylindrical projection but with messed up proportions.
I have no idea why they switched to this sphere mesh. I would say the old one was more versatile.
