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HINTS AND TIPS

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Texturing Techniques 3

  When creating a texture map for spheres it should ideally be a seamless tile and of  2 : 1 ratio. One problem when mapping to spherical shaped objects is the pinching which occours at the poles. To significantly reduce this effect the image should be progessively more compressed, vertically, towards each pole [top and bottom] to compensate.

  Left is our original image and bottom right the same image that has been compressed top and bottom.
  Top right, the left sphere has an unaltered checker pattern. It shows how the pinching at the poles has distorted the pattern. The sphere on the right uses the compressed pattern and retains the checker squares much better.
  'How do I do that then ?' I hear you ask. Well one way would be to use the Displace filter in Photoshop, Photo-Paint etc and the displacement maps we've provided here with some instructions.
  Another way is using Photoshop's Polar Co-ordinates filter. Tutorial here

 

 

  Below, texturing a moon. On the right is the original square seamless moonscape texture. Top left the same texture compressed using our displacement maps. The bottom left picture shows the uncompressed texture on a sphere, showing pronounced 'pinching'. This has been greatly reduced on the right hand sphere, using the compressed version.

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