Cool. (Off-Topic)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Thursday, April 25, 2019, 17:24 (1826 days ago) @ INSANEdrive

Props for getting out of your comfort zone to make something you. :)

Thanks! :)

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All I needed was a basic 3D program that could do some raytracing-ish rendering, some spheres, and images to use as the colored faces wrapped around those spheres. How hard could it be? Well... this project took about six hours across two days...

For a rendering program I went with Strata Design 3D SE 7 from the Mac App Store. It had two advantages: 1. It was free. 2. I seem to recall playing around in Strata 3D way back in the 90's/2000's, so I was vaguely familiar with it.

I have to admit, I was surprised to see you not say Blender.

Heh. I didn't even remember it existed. Also, I seem to recall that back in the day Blender could only do phong shading or some such thing and all the fancy kids who found/stole/bought a copy of Lightwave were the only ones with raytracing and caustics and whatever.

The really hard part was mapping the sphere. Or at least it was a lot more troublesome than I feel it should have been. I'm no 3D artist and I proved that pretty well during this little project.

Yeh. UVing a Sphere can be a real pain. I see your mesh is the standard "poll" based mesh, where the edge flow comes to the point at two ends. Quad balls would have been easier, which you can make by SubDiv on a Cube, fyi.

Ha. Mostly I clicked the sphere button and made a sphere. I didn't actually know there were cube-spheres! I made my sphere then just duplicated it a lot after I got my textures right.

I figure a real 3D artist would make an image to the right dimensions to encircle a sphere and slap it on and be pretty much done. Me? I had to go through like 10+ images of various sizes in a trial and error process until I finally sized the smiley face part small enough on the green/yellow/red/blue background so I could wrap it around the spheres without them repeating or failing to cover parts of the spheres.

Real artist make fantastically complex buildings, or starships, or characters. I could barely wrap a face around a sphere. Figuring out the texture mapping modes wasn't super fun either... not hard... but everything seems to default to infinite repeating which was not what I wanted.

UV Space by default is like playing Portal in a Mirrored Square. Anything that overlaps the edge of the square goes to the other parallel side. Unless you can change the setting to clamp, that is.

I'd think there'd be like a equation or rule or template out there that would work for a sphere of a given size... I did not find one so I winged it...