http://www.2shared.com/file/mwAJbhhW/Seamless_UV_Sphere.html

Just thought I'd throw this out to you guys. Do what you will with it, it's just a sphere, meant for spherical based textures, no need to credit me for it. The real credit should go to Dragon*Born, who gave me the instructions to make the blasted thing, so give him a big thanks.

Since I went through insanity making this, I wanted everyone else to be able to just download a sphere and not have to bother messing around making one, so, here it is.

EDIT: ARGH!! I just realized this isn't perfectly UVmapped, it is around the sides, but the tops are messed up, I redid it, the tops are less noticable, but still a bit messed, not much I can do though, from a technical standpoint, the map should be seamless, but there are seams at the top and bottom. Best you'll get for now though.

[DISCLAIMER]Please, PLEASE do NOT complain about 2shared, it's a fine download site and allows me to upload stuff without having to bother with maintaining an account or anything, I like that, so let's leave it there. Besides, I had told them about their download button being too small and they have since added a nice big blue one, so stop complaining, I don't want to hear it and I won't think twice to report anyone causing a ruckus.[/DISCLAIMER]

You can't perfectly UV map a sphere. If you want to unmantle an apple you got to cut somewhere, else you'll have to eat it as it is. You have to chose the method which suits best what your intending to do, but some little seams will always be there. In case they are only located at the pole caps of the model, they should easily be fixed in Photoshop or Gimp by using the same color on any seam areas. As you are in a great distance from those areas ingame, you shouldn't be able to see anything at all.

How did they unwrap the vanilla ones, maybe just copy that method!

There aren't any sphere meshes in the game mapped like this as far as I know, plus I don't think they'd be any good, evidence suggests that the UV's on such an object would be absolute crap, seeing as how a ton of the statics in the game have really, really bad UVmaps.

Oh, and it's not impossible to make a sphere's UV perfect, download Celestia and take a look, all the planets are mapped PERFECTLY, absolutely perfectly. Unfortunately Celestia generates the meshes in realtime so there's no way I could just rip them.

I have a theory on how to map perfect UV's though, I'm going to test it now.

I know one way to map a sphere perfectly seamless (using a tiling texture) but it has limitations. Probably wouldn't work so well for "planets" but could potentially work for a "moon."

In max you create a box (cube) with 4+ segments on all sides, apply spherify modifier, and possibly turbo smooth it and reapply spherify to get it more perfectly spherical. Then what you will have is a sphere with all quads. Then you just layout the 6 "sides" overlapping on the UV and apply your texture. This is a limited method however, like I said.

@AOF, not exactly what I need, plus that requires max, which I don't have. Blender has the option by default of placing a UVsphere (quads), or an Icosphere (tri's), so I'm not really in need of the actual sphere itself, just a sphere that's UVmapped perfectly.

The reason I'm being so picky about the seams is that I'm going to end up using the sphere as the new nighttime sky mesh in Morrowind, allowing me even more extensibility when making the textures. If there are seams on the mesh, than they will end up distorting the stars/nebulae and anything else that's on the top of the sphere.

Isn't the night sky (stars) on a dome mesh? I am pretty sure that the sky models are linked to the characters position, kind of like how the rain works. Seems like a sphere would not work so well. I have no clue though, I dont like tinkering with technical junk, just gets me frustrated. :brokencomputer:

Yeah, that made me wonder as well, why a full sphere? If you have a simple half sphere dome, you can easily UV map that half without any seams, just some small stretching which doesn't need to be seen at all.

The Night sky will need to be a full sphere so that I can make the night sky change appearance depending on time of year, I'm also going to put in Monthly constellations, that's right, what we should've had years ago.

wow, that can be done?

Perhaps you could rotate the sphere so the poles are always at the horizon, or even below the horizon, rather then have the poles at the top of the sky? This way you could hide most of the uv issues.

I know nothing of UV maps or what it is you're trying to do, but what the hell, I'll give a suggestion: would it be possible to create a pair of oblate spheroids that overlap in a way that hid the others' poles? If you stretch two circles just a tiny bit, it would be enough for the overlapped region to get hidden. You'd have to work with two circles in tandem, however.

Yeah, I could do that, it would make it significantly harder to texture the spheres though, so it wouldn't be practical. Alternatively, I could just size the top circle of vertices to a point where most of the UV issues are hidden, they'd still be visible, but whatever, they would be a lot harder to notice.


I had thought about that, as you said though, it would be extremely impractical to texture it.

I was just playing a very recent AAA Unreal Engine game the other day and noticed all spheres in the game had hideous seams running North-South since the spheres were UV mapped as two separate halves. It seems even the professionals sometimes improperly UV map spheres and then don't even make the texture tile-able...what noobs! This is particularly egregious since the game otherwise has totally awesome artwork.

Anyway...random post here.

Regarding what you are trying to do, since the sphere is problematic, would it be easier to make a half sphere and just animate the texture/UV map? like http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1081904-tutorial-animated-textures-with-blender/page__p__15759913__hl__uv%2Banimation__fromsearch__1#entry15759913

Just an idea
ST

Maybe, I'll give it a shot when I get back to my PC, at my Dad's ATM, and I'll be going winter camping Sunday morning till' Tuesday afternoon, so I can't do anything until then. I also don't have internet at my house anymore, so I probably won't be able to post here very often, probably only on the weekends and such.

Next time though, I'll have some cool stuff to show you guys, I'm working on a concept art inspired Ghostfence, more stuff related to my upcoming skies, and I'm thinking of quickly whipping up some texture replacers for Hlaalu and Redoran architecture, since I've been annoyed with the existing replacers, they either aren't detailed enough, or are too far away from their original appearance.

Anyways, the sphere here will stay as it is for now I guess, and I'm probably going to end up looking for alternative methods of pulling off my crazy ideas for the night sky.

Did you see zackg's hlaalu texuture replacer? that isnt too far from the original. Although I had thought about tinting it a bit towards sepia because it seems a bit bright to me.

...

i spotted what looks like a perfectly UV mapped Sphere i would have spoke up a bit sooner but i didn't have internet access. If you look at the magic_target_ill.NIF in the W folder it looks to me that there are two spheres in that mesh that are UV mapped like you want.

I'll take a look when I get home, I'm in Montreal right now, visiting with my stepmom's family. Gotta love this city.

To papill6n and Tarius, stay on topic please, I'd rather not derail the thread.

EDIT: Took a look at the mesh, there are 3 different spheres in it, I just extracted one out of it, and modified the UV a bit to do what I want, it's looking pretty good now, I think I'm going to go with it for the night sky.