My latest project is a mini-golf game of sorts and it is, so far, going pretty well! Except for one thing.
I need to make a decent golf ball. I made a very ugly, low-poly golf ball in Blender, but since my experience with that program is limited, my skill stops there. So I tried to simply texture a sphere. That worked great, except the texture is pinched at the poles. Generally, on a real golf ball, the dimples are the same size all the way around. Is there a way to compensate for or eliminate the pinching? I understand that that is one of the few ways to get the texture onto a sphere, but is there a way around it?
I would suggest buying a model off a stock 3d website. If you are not experienced in modelling then you should probably not be doing any otherwise the game will almost certainly look poor.
You could probably pick up a .3DS golf ball for 20 dollars off a stock website with texture / UV’s already in place.
Nothing will kill your game faster than making it 3D and putting in crappy programmer homebrew models. You would be far better off going for a gimmick theme if you do not have the modelling resources in your team to go up against the likes of the Tiger Woods or Lets Golf franchise.
Agreed completely. That said, all you need to do is make a seam at the equator, unwrap, and overlap them 100%. If you want to be really efficient about it, you can take all the resulting verts and weave them back and forth between two verts of a triangle, leaving the pole intact. What did you even do to get the UVs you have? I tried producing that result in Blender and I can’t even figure out how to get that result without some work. The seam at the equator method is a 2-step process. :?
Look at a real golf-ball and you will notice that the dimples do not line up like you have in your texture.
I did a 3D project (back when I owned a 3D animation company,) 15 years ago that involved a golf-ball. Needless to say, it was interesting making the texture map and UV work.
I agree, buying a golf ball is the quickest and easiest way to get the highest quality golf ball, but I (think that I) am so close to making a decent golf that I hate to give in.
FYI, I just slapped on the texture onto a sphere made in Unity. That said, I don’t understand your two step process (even though it sounds simple:lol:) Also, what do you mean by UVs?
@LostLogic: You’re right, a real golf ball has a lot of irregularities. I have some that have a dimple inside of a dimple and others that have oval shaped dimples. To me, my golf ball (not counting the pinching at the poles) looks like a generic member of it’s family. It could just be me though :?
If you need the golf ball now, buy it. You’ve got a long way to go. Otherwise, go watch a ton of Blender tutorials. Understanding UVs is paramount to texturing.
The problem for people learning is that there is no simple explanation on what UVs are all about. Once I knew how to do it, I realised it isn’t that complex.
It means mapping the textures onto the polygons of the model.
It is done by marking the edges of a group of polygons, so that the group can be unfolded onto a texture. You then move their vertices over the image so that they line up with the part of the texture you want to see on those polygons on the model. You do this for all the polygons in a model.
The fewer groups of polygons you have, the better for performance, but the harder it is to avoid distorted textures.
Sorry, I cannot explain how to do it in Blender as I use Wings 3D (another free 3D modelling package).
Here’s UV Mapping in blender3D in 3:28 – this guy works a little quick for my tutorial taste but it should give you a decent idea of what is involved with mapping textures onto 3D objects:
Also, this is a box tutorial, which is a different critter from spheres and the types of projections those generate. You really picked a doozy (dimpled golf ball) to cut your UV teeth on!! I’m pretty headstrong myself about home-rolling models…another thought is you might want to check one of the free blender model repositories to see if there are some .blend files you can reverse engineer and learn how other folks accomplished a similar effect.
Thanks for the replies! So basically UV mapping is applying texture(s) to a model? At least in its basic sense, I can do that:smile:
This is way off-topic, but does anyone have any idea how long it takes for Unity to respond to emails? I sent the store email address an email a month ago and another support address another email a few weeks ago, but I have not yet received any response. Previously, Unity was on the ball when it came to responding to emails, what happened:?
