Wrap around Sphere

[dulo]

With import Image I get a volumetric map of earth and would like to wrap it around a ball. But all in volumetric. Can this be done ? How can it be done ? All help very much appreciated !

[Psmith]

If you mean Voxel painting, there is no unwrapping of maps (spherical). It is a kind of Direct Painting, from the camera view. There may be some way to do this using shaders, that I am unaware of.

Greg Smith

[digman]

It is possible but not a direct way.

Here is the method to get a what you want in 3DCoat.

Apply a spherical uv map to a parametric sphere in your modeling program and apply a earth texture to it. Of course you will get some stretching at the poles which I'm sure you already know.

Export the sphere as an obj file with it's uv map plus export the texture.

Save your earth texture also as a greyscale image. Some adjustments could be done to the grayscale image depending upon where you want more height in the displacement map to show.

Now in 3DCoat import the sphere obj into the paint room using the Microvertex method.

Under the textures menu in the paint room import the grayscale earth texture as a displacement map on it's own layer. After it loads you can increase the depth of the displacement in the layers menu under the layers tab.

Import your texture map to it's own layer.

Your done.

You can now save a displacement map or a normal map under the textures menu. If you have worked on the texture map, you can export that too.

Also under the file menu (export) you can export a real higher polygon obj (uv map is included) of the displacement map if you so desire. You have a choice of 3 export polygon sizes depending upon the your carcass resolution (polygons) when you imported your sphere obj. This way if you wanted to work more on the earth in the voxel room you can load the higher polygon version there but import the low polygon version with the uv map in the retopo room as your low polygon retopo mesh for merging (baking)

Now I quickly found a low res earth texture so my example is not the best looking so a higher resolution image will give you a better quality map. I also only created a 1024 texture map upon importing.

The second pictures show the higher polygon version merged using without voxelizing into surface mode. This method relies upon the amount of polygons that are really in the obj model and is not voxel resolution depended for capturing details like voxel mode is...

By the way, nice animations at your company's site...

[digman]

I must have been a little brain tired, a regular polygon sphere would work as well with spherical mapping. You guys are pros so some of the information you know already of course but I included it for others who might not know some of the methods I discussed.