Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Engage Thrusters
1.
Create a new empty scene and name it
Planet
, add a
UV Sphere
, set both its
segments and rings to 12, and set its size to 8 (all these are seings in the
Tool
Shelf
, immediately available ater creaing the UV Sphere). Then go to the upper
part of the Tool Shelf and click on the
Smooth
buton (remember we are working
in Object Mode).
Then go to the
Modifiers
tab in the
Properties Editor
and add a
Subdivision
Surface
modifier; set it to two subdivisions both on
View
and on
Render
.
2.
The next step is going to the
Material
tab on the
Properties Editor
and adding
a new material to the Sphere (it should have no material by default). Name the
material as "planet", and adjust the seings as follows:
F
Diffuse panel:
Color: 1 Red, 1 Green, 1 Blue
Intensity: 1
F
Specular Intensity: 0
F
Ambient: 0.05 (Shading panel)
3.
4.
In the
Texture
tab select an empty texture slot and click on
+ New
, name the new
texture as
planetDiff
(
Diff
stands for diffuse), then set its type to
Image or
Movie
and click on
Open
to load the planet map from the hard disk.
Since the map of the planet has been created using a mapping technique to put on 2D a
texture that exists in 3D, we need to set the right opions to get the inverse efect: Taking
the 2D map and projecing it onto the sphere properly. To do that go to the
Mapping
panel
and select
Sphere
from the drop-down menu labeled as
Projection
. Finally make sure that
the
Influence
panel has
Diffuse Color
enabled and its value set to
1
; no other opion in the
influence panel should be enabled.
Now we have a nicely textured planet to use in the background of our scene. Thankfully it
is very easy to find good planet maps on the Internet, so this part of the project becomes
quite trivial.
Objective Complete - Mini Debriefing
The planet is very easy, since it depends mostly on a good texture, which is quite easy to find
on the Internet. The trick to get the texture correctly applied on the sphere is just to use the
correct projecion method, which in this case is very intuiive: Sphere.
