That's all the same planet

O wow, well I like that angle the best then .

Edited by - Question Asker2044 on 12/27/2005 7:22:57 PM

...and yes, that is a gun with a glowing part

I saw that and thought it was a light....
Edit: and a question
Will you be releasing a package with planets in it, that would be pretty cool to be able to add new planets? Maybe I could add new planets, but I stink at skinning things that good.





Edited by - Question Asker2044 on 12/27/2005 7:31:35 PM

I will be releasing everything I've been working on as part of the final release of XML Toolkit.

thx uni but i already have cmps of all planets and moons of the sol system for the SL-R mod

but i wanted to try to build them via txm

@argh
u asked why 4 and ill tell you

you are using only 3 textures and it works pretty good for planets with "random textures"

but if you look at how the textures are placed then you see the one of the textures are used twice (for the northpole and the southpole)

-> texture 1: placed on the upper and lower part of the sph
-> texture 2+3: placed as half spheres in the middle of the sph

so if you take texture 1 as the northpole then you will have 2 northpoles displayed on your planet but no southpole
ergo: a 4th texture is needed to display the southpole (lower part of the globe)

and the problem still remains how to create those 4 textures
the textures in the middle are no real problem... they fit very well
but the upper and lower texture are the problem because you cant uvmap the given texture of the earth (the mentioned nasa map) on a square in a way that it will look good
you will need to convert a square texture into a spheric texture with squared borders

well to make it short... personally i dont see a future for any real planets like the earth or jupiter in txm format

Um... ok... but I sincerly doubt that players will care whether the North and South Poles are entirely accurate, to be perfectly honest. If that's a big issue, then you can always just a take a sphere and chop it up for a 4-map projection pretty easily...

believe me it looks absolutly crappy if there are only 3 textures...
but like i said its pretty easy to tell the txm to have a 4th texture

like i said the only problem i have is to place those textures correctly... ive no idea how to do that

(Ramdonly flys above the planet and looks at the north pole..)

"Wait a second......the north pole isn't 100% in the center of the planet, man someone needs to do a better job..." lol


That's cool to hear your going to release it in a package.
What format will the planets be in?

OP-R8R you will need 6 textures to get close to making earth, as the .sph files have 6 panels to cover, 7 being the atmosphere. These pics are about as close to a UVMap as you'll get as there technically isn't a mesh in the .sph files, you can change the size of a planet by editting one node in UTF edit, if there was a mesh you wouldn't be able to.


The planet on the left is a gasgiant of 5000 the largest size in FL but the one on the right is 8000 and made from a 3000.

*EDIT* put the thumbs side by side
**shuffles of with a new headache**

Edited by - Bejaymac on 12/29/2005 5:49:22 PM

basicly only 4 are needed not 6
i already tested it... u only need to edit a little bit with utf

I've found 3 different formats of .dds files in the 6 txm files I've taken apart.

16-bit dds 256x256 (my dds viewer can't tell me anything other than it's 16-bit)
DXT5 dds 256x256 6 mipmaps
DXT3 dds 1024x1024 8 mipmaps

The files I used in the pics in my other post were DXT5 so thats what I've been using, so I don't know if the other types are applied different. The textures that you see are the whole texture (all 256x256 of them) and not just part of it. These were done with a nasa map (1024x512) that I cut the middle in to 4 256x256 panels and added them to the txm.


They line up perfectly around the middle but the distortion where the left and right sides of the texure are squeezed on to the panel is a real pain. Anybody got any ideas on how I can stretch my textures to try and cheat this problem.


**shuffles of with a new headache**

yeah thats what i meant
btw. check the upper and lower part of the juputer
u will see that the textures dont fit there aswell

---

Anybody got any ideas on how I can stretch my textures to try and cheat this problem.

---

I think it would be doable with the Distort->Spherize function in Photoshop, but I never found the perfect value...

Anyway, in Photoshop you need to expand the canvas of the texture you want to do it to, so that no part of the texture is outside of the circular border of the function (which works in a circle and doesn't touch pixels outside of it. So, Make the original txm's square touch the function's circle. And make sure that the extra surface you add, matches with texturem because some of it will be "sucked into" the original texture when the Spherize function is applied). Then make it hollow, if you know what I mean (a value lower than 0)*, to compensate for the "blowing-up" that happens when the textures are stretched over the globe.

*( This is the value that I never found... All different values I tried -I was trying to skin a planet as a Death Star- had their own little distortions. But of course, with a Jupiter-like planet and even with a copy of the Earth, a little distortion is much less a problem than with a Death Star, with all these parallel horizontals that should match perfectly. Not to mention the blurriness at close range, which sucked. After all, it's no moon, it's a space station.

Applying this function will affect the sharpness. So when you would try it, start with a much larger texture than your end result need to be, so you can scale it down afterwards. Otherwise, the edges are much blurrier than the inner parts of the texture.

Anyway, as I said, I never achieved to do this perfectly so I cannot even promise it's the right way... Eventually I gave up on it. Should be possible in a much easier way (would be cool if some of the DA people reveil some of their methods).

When I create a planet now, I just use the game's txm files and alter them. When I add continents to an earth-like planet, I make sure not to have much details too close to the corners to avoid the distortion becoming noticeable.



Edited by - Moonhead on 12/30/2005 11:30:55 AM