Spheremaps - possible?

Unity Engine
1

Is it possible to use Spheremaps (Spherical Environment Maps) natively in Unity? I’ve had some good success in Blitz3D with spheremaps, and I have found them to work on even the oldest hardware. I know Unity has good support for Cubemaps, but I’m curious as to whether I can force it to use spheremaps instead.

2

Yes. You should use { TexGen SphereMap } on the texture in the shader, similar how cubemap shaders use { TexGen CubeReflect } on the texture.

But then of course, cube maps are more versatile, produce more “correct” reflections, and pretty much everything supports them.

3

Select your texture from the project view…
-Rightclic on it;
-Clic on “Import settings”
-Use “Spheremap”
That’s it…

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4

Gaston, I don’t think thats really what the poster is after, That is just a method to turn a texture into a cubemap.

What Aras said is what he is asking for.

5

Thank-you, that’s exactly what I was after.

I totally agree that cubemaps are better, but there a few instances where spheremaps are really useful, and I was worried that Unity would always convert them into cubemaps. This is a great help.

6

Heya, I’m developing in Unity on the iPhone - and my understanding (please correct me if i’m wrong) is that cubemaps are unavailable on that hardware. Spheremaps seem to work well, but I was wondering if it was possible (again, on the iPhone) to write a shader that used an alpha mask to determine where it should use spheremaping and where it should use diffuse (imagine a sword built as 1 piece with 1 shader where you want the hilt diffuse but the blade environment mapped). I imagine it would be done with 2 passes, first the spheremapping, and then overlaying the diffuse on top of that according to where the alpha is/isn’t? Any thoughts on this?

-jdm