I'm trying to map an image of the earth to a sphere, the problem is with the maps I have, they aren't designed to be put on a sphere, they're just flat. Does anyone know where I can find maps of the earth that can be put on a sphere? Thanks in advance. Chris

Do you have Carrara CD? What version? Carrara3 have hi res earth map and it can be put on sphere with texture editor. If you want sphere with terrain based on bump, you would need "Anything Grooves" plug in from digital curvd guild.

I dunno - is the evil dr ganemede site still up? in the past I've tried coding my own spherical representation but that was before I understood uv mapping - needless to say the poles weren't mapping right right but it did map ok at the equator and rotated ok. The last time I tried maping to a sphere other than in Bryce, was with RayDream studio 5.5. At that time a bitmap shader at a 2(X) to 1(Y) ratio worked well on a sphere. If you want heightmapping you can find elevation maps all over the place, you will only need to figure out how to use that as a bmp map - I'd suggest you start by trying black as 0 and white as your higest elevation and converting the height information. If you happen to find highly detailed global height maps let me know. JPL and USGS seem likely sources. For a really good terrain editor for small areas(a few aquare miles) as opposed to a full globe try 3dem. it has refewrences on where to get USGS dem maps and will convert them to other formats if you want, such as geotiff which I can convert to a regular tiff using a software I'm developing for Bryce freestuff which you should be able to use for this when it is released if you don't find a better way before that (Tiffer should be in free stuff sometime in the next month or so barring any difficulties.) Like I said just random thoughts, - TJ

Thanks for the quick replies - I knew Carrara came with earth textures, but I thought they were the average textures that are automatically put into the shader bin. Thanks for the info Waldo - those maps are great.