I am making a project about a realistic-ish mars simulation and i would like to use this flat map with unity terrain to get an accurate map.
Mars flat map : http://mola.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/marsflat.jpg
Is this possible or will i have to use a special addon to do this?
EDIT : I looked at some other maps and found this which is much better but is rounded. Would this work? : http://tharsis.gsfc.nasa.gov/o1.jpg
The thing you need is a raw heightmap map, that texture don’t have enough resolution, and the other image is spheric, you need to get the heightmap of mars, or atleast a big texture for transform it to raw.
For transforms pngs or textures to raw you can use this program:
http://imagej.nih.gov/ij/index.html
And as the other user is saying, if you are planning to do a sphere terrain you can’t with the built in unity.
The “flat” map, assuming that the colours are encoded heights, would be fine to use in Unity other than the fact it’s very low resolution. The rounded image is not useful since it only shows one half of the planet’s surface.
Either way though, Unity’s terrain system is designed for creating 2d planar surfaces - it cannot create a ellipsoidal surface, which is what I assume you’re trying to do if you want to model an entire planetary surface. For that you’d need to create a mesh programmatically, sampling the appropriate pixel location from the heightmap to extrude the appropriate vertices. It can be done with a little coding, but it’s not trivial.
