Sorry to come by with my pessimism again, but let me explain the reasons behind it…
If you look at this link about spherical mapping(found through google) you’l see that it is possible to get somthing “interesting” out of a bitmap image.
The two things that bother me here are: making it seamless without ruining much detail (you can do it in image processing as well, but might be more complex to work with a distorted image)
The detail loss is image-based detail loss, and not “pixel deformation”… So it is basically more blurred near the poles…
So I look forward to see the results!
(Hey, there always has to be some pessimistic guy arround, hasn’t there? )
Edit:
:idea: Idea :idea: : Hmm, This “detail optimization for spherical mapping” (as is described in the link) can be turned into a device/plug-in!.. Or even a macro, if get the right shape to pass on to a displacement device!
Well so far i used Richard Rosenman’s Spherical Mapping Corrector v1.2… it is a free photoshop plugin and to make it seemless i will use Real Texture Tools which has the best seamless plugin for photoshop i had ever come upon… i will try to get that done today…
That would be a nice device Fil but i was just going to use these maps for masks to displace planetary scale terrains within terragen 2 so for me pixel details are not an issue because after all these are just going to be masks… the heightfields themselves will be edited and rendered in terragen 2 with the use of those masks over the planet sphere to properly place the land regions where they need to be according to how real geology would have it’s locations from plate techtonics and erosive movements…
E-mail is fine. Fil’s point basically echoes my own, although with better illustration. But Sethren, I think for your purposes it may be adequate. We will have to see I suppose.
well it may just be a crazy idea afterall???.. but i do understand where you are coming from… shoot!!! this may not work at all… worse case senario i will just paint the terrain entirely within terragen 2 when beta is released… those masks maybie to hard anyway… trial and error i suppose…
Well, remember that TG2 will have a good set of its own built-in generators. WM will definitely be useful with TG2 anyway, if only to create “spot detail”.
I’m afraid I can’t give any specifics at this point. But you can probably count on it being well setup to create basic, realistic, natural terrain forms “out of the box”.
Allrighty… super dooper extra classified… heh,heh,heh… i can probably get a fairly good idea what it may have to offer…
i am sure it will not dissapoint…
Looks like me that the point is the final detail in the animation when going for closeups.
Though WM 1.0 will be capable of creating only 8192² heightmaps, you could stitch several heightmaps next to each other.
Making them seamless should be the easiest part.
The polar distorsion is as far as I know already part of photoshop’s built in filters, but it works with only one pole, though.
The problem would be a lack of detail at the equator, as there is the same amount of information as on the smaller areas at the polar regions.
)