I’m trying to create planets for my mobile game and rather than downloading a package, I prefer to create my own assets to understand exactly how things are working.
I’m amazed at how easy it is to simply download a texture and wrap it around a sphere, thereby mimicking a planet:
It’s not super high-res or detailed, but for my purposes it does not need to be since the planets are viewed at a distance. I do not want complex shaders or mesh geometry as I am targeting high mobile performance, I just need a nice crisp texture on a sphere. The problem arises however when the texture wraps at its end:
Since my planets are rotating, these ugly seams will be displayed to the player, destroying the illusion. Does anyone know how to eliminate this issue? I have tried changing the “wrap mode” to “clamp” and “repeat” etc but none of these seem to make much difference. When I apply tiling it becomes even more of an issue since the grid lines become more frequent and obvious. Tiling is however useful to change the look of a texture, so being able to use it would be nice.
Do I need to edit the textures themselves? This seems like it would be very difficult as I am not an artist. I just want to download free images and use them in-game. Any help would be really appreciated! The settings for the textures are shown as below, with the shader itself being the standard shader or mobile diffuse.
P.S. If you also have any idea how to blend the texture around the top/bottom of the sphere (north/south poles) that would also be massively appreciated. Right now it always looks like the textures are applied from the top down, thereby always converging at the poles:
This is an issue because if I apply a tilt to a planet, the pole can become visible to the player and this also destroys the illusion of a planet.