Ok, all of you space sim/space shooter developers out there. I am struggling with developing planet textures that do not pinch at the poles. I have read numerous tutorials on how to eliminate the pinching and…none of them work! Photoshop even has a plugin just for that purpose and…it doesn’t work!! Has anyone developed a surfire way to eliminate the pinching?
it’s not what you have asked for, but might be interesting for you if you’re a blender user:
it’s a not yet official patch for blender. builds are linked below the article including links to some blend files.
just play around with the values, bake out the texture and normal map and you’re done.
you can do stuff like this (and much better things) in a few minutes:
http://vol-2.com/div/planets/
The problem is probably not your texture. The typical UV map used for a sphere will always pinch a spherical projection texture because the point at the pole itself is shared by at the triangles all the pole- which have discontinuous edges.
I’ve always used geospheres/tesselation for planets. They are the best from the geometry, you can get away with less polys and distortion. Problem can be to come up with proper textures for it. If you do calculate them on your own it’s not such an issue but if you want to use some of the material you can find on the web, like for instance highres maps for planets in out solar system, then you’re having a problem. Although i never thought about if it could make sense recalculating such maps.
Well, either using a tessellation or a quad/tri sphere you could always use a standard texture projection in your 3d software and bake to the UV map.