Here is a moon created with the standard poser ball prop.

Attached Link: Better Poser Planets with UV Mapper Pro

Here is a moon created with a sphere from UV Mapper Pro. A tut is available in the UV Mapper forum. After following the tut please come back here to finish up the Poser portion of the tut.

Open up Poser and import the obj file saved out of UV Mapper Pro. Then go to render/materials and load the moon map and bump, or other planetary maps you have downloaded. Use the material settings shown for starters.

Here are Venus textures from the NASA JPL page applied to our sphere.

I have to say that this is for Pro Pack and Poser 4. I have not tried it in Poser 5 or 6.

Thank you.

Don't forget, astronomy fans, that Earth is thicker pole to pole than at the equator and Saturn is the opposite. :O)

Great tutorial, UVDan !

Many thanks. :-)

stahlratte

xantor, fls13, and stahlratte.

Except for the gas giants, for all intensive purposes, the planets are spherical - unless you are doing animations for NASA or something. Oblateness in most cases is negligible. But I would make Phobos and Deimos with extra special care. :)

Oblate! That's the word for Saturn, and oblate it is! Obvious even from photos.

So how would you get rid of the polar pinching at the ah.. poles ? ~S

Message edited on: 06/04/2005 03:54

Nevermind - figured it -my bad :-) ~S

It has already been stretched at the poles to take care of it.(just in case anyone else is wondering)

Edit - double post w/o urls. I'm sorry, but I don't delete posts. S

Message edited on: 06/04/2005 10:05

Stretching the map at the poles won't do anything to fix it - the texture needs to be flat, max one or two shades, otherwise you get polar pinching. I'll show you :

(Sorry 'bout linking, tried keeping thread load size down :-))

http://spinner.northern-studios.com/imgs/mesh1.jpg - generic UVM sphere

http://spinner.northern-studios.com/imgs/mesh2.jpg - generic sphere stretch test(img, not native UVM)

http://spinner.northern-studios.com/imgs/mesh3.jpg - Texture from front

http://spinner.northern-studios.com/imgs/mesh4.jpg - Texture on top with polar pinching.

So the workaround I figured was to just use a bump-map for terrain variety and then put a one-coloured texture over it - like an icecap.

If the texture is flat-shaded on top you won't get this.
~S

unless your downloaded textures have NOT BEEN MAPPED PROPERLY to account for the pole pinching by stretching the texture at the poles. Here is the Land of ocean and ice texture from one of the planetary map download pages. Notice the polar ice cap where there is NO TEXTURE PINCH.

Here is a shot of the pole of the moon. Notice the craters are still round and not squashed.

First of all - dont scream. Second - I assumed it also applied to textures you didn't download from a website somewhere - there is a discrepancy at the top of the moon, if you look closely - the texture gets narrower. The ice on Greenland is somewhat pinched (not squashed, pinched)- the isce on the southern tip doesnt look like that, if you compared it w. a map (And since I work with 3D military mapping applications, I know how Greenland looks with ice) Since we're not seeing eye to eye here, I'll leave you to it, and not ask any furher questions which may be difficult to answer. ~S

I did not mean to scream at you. I was trying to highlight my point. Among other things, I need to learn HTML so I can put text in different colors. Sorry we can't agree. I do not know how to squash the textures, but you can see on the map that they are obviously squashed near the poles. I am posting a moon map to show how the craters are ellipsoids near the poles. The person making the texture from satellite data had to make a choice in how to squash the texture and it made the mistake happen on Greenland. I wish I could tell you how to paint your own textures with just the right amount of "squash" to make them come out. I sincerly hope that if any readers of this thread come across a tut that specifies this, that they post the link to it in this thread.

Fair enough - All caps means to shout in web/netspeak and I thought you were shouting at me. As for HTML - you may want to check this site out: http://www.davesite.com/webstation/html/chap03.shtml Actually - taking a peek at the moon map helped - I moseyed over to some of the NASA archives. They're squashing, whilst a lot of us others are actually stretching or reducing colour/density in that area. So I'll actually see what happens if I blow a texture up around the poles instead of making it as noisefree as possible ~S

I think a good place to start is a link like this: Map Definitions And move on to this link: Map Projections There is no mapping of a sphere to a plane that will ever be without distortions of one type or another. The hardest part here, I guess, is getting a planar map projection that matches the UV layout of the sphere. The one pictured above for the Moon appears to be a Miller Cylindrical projection (as compared to a Mercator where the poles are stretched vertically).

That will help.