Eric Walch wrote:Griff wrote:been mucking about with some dry cracked earth textures and the parallax shader, .... although once again i've UV unwrapped these really badly - some clearly visible and horrible seams in the texture which the parallax makes even worse !
Its not the problem that you wrapped it wrong. The problem is that it will never be possible to UV wrap a seamless tiled map fully around an object.
This is, of course, correct. It is also an old problem with many tricks to fix it. Mostly this involves taking special care over the placement and treatment of the edges of the uv map in the various textures. Sometimes a tool has something special to deal with the problem ... it can get as fancy as "airbrushing" the model in 3D and having the computer work out what the 2D texture is supposed to do. Its not unlike having to deal with the seams in airfix models ;)
I also noticed that oolites <smooth> characteristic seems to add an artifact to asteroids. The neolite asteroids are not smoothed, because of this.
One way to deal with the "mirror" method, is to use two textures - one for each side. Initially the second texture is a mirror of the first, but you only need the edge information, so you can paint all the middle up to the outermost few pixels as something different, and also make a different normalmap.
Another method is to use a fancy projection - spherical or cylindrical. This can be trickier to set up depending on the actual shapes involved, however it will create seams that are easier to handle. There is a big general discussion on mapping spheres around here someplace, as well as notes specific to mapping planets. I have used a spherical map to a square texture for a sphere - there is a big longitudinal seam which is hidden by making the texture itself seamless - there are also pinches at the poles which I hid by cutting discs in the poles and hiding the resulting circle-seam in a line on the surface texture. The polar pinch in the planetary textures is handled by brushing it out in a polar projection.
For the neolite asteroids I just used a blind unfolding and the burned-metal textures (which are fairly undemanding). You have to sit and watch one for a while to spot the seams - go try - no attempt has been made to hide them. So the simplest solution is not to try anything really fancy.
@Griff: heat-glow would be neat on boulders and splinters - since we'd mostly see them after blowing up an asteroid. Glow from asteroids may be due to the presence of radioactive or phosphorescent materials. I'd second the notion that some splinters turn out to be something special - isn't there an oxp like that? Perhaps it turns out to be rich in gold or radioactives? I had a notion awhile-back to have some boulders appear as menger sponges, blowing them up gets lots of little ones which scoop to give alien items. The sponge models have lots and lots of polys for quite small iterations - but I'm trying to get a workable cheat by putting a lot of the small detail in the shader with mixed results. How-ever - it may be simpler to have some splinters actually be bits of old bases and wreckage and so on.
