There are mountains and seas so the earth is not a flat spherical surface. Do we still have a similar 2D texture space?
Staffethanweber
Nice question! From my understanding, there are many UV unwrapping algorithms that exist. A goal of these algorithms is to minimize distortion, but the texture will still be 2D. You can think of the algorithm as turning the sphere with its bumps into a triangle mesh, and then finding the correspondences from these triangles to the 2D texture space -- having a 1-to-1 mapping between the triangles in 3D and 2D.
ld184
By minimizing distortion, do you mean minimizing angular distortion or distance distortion?
sZwX74
@yzliu567 I think it would still be similar to this simplification because the elevation that the mountains and seas adds is negligible compared to the radius of the earth. In the same way, our world space would not be a perfect sphere, but the elevation change is negligible to where it would not make a significant difference.
lwg0320
Does the texture space need to be rectangular? In the case of a map, it makes sense to have it in a rectangular space because of readability, but it introduces a lot of problems like some countries might look larger than it's actual size. So if we were to code the function, is it optimal to make the texture space a rectangle, or does it not matter?
There are mountains and seas so the earth is not a flat spherical surface. Do we still have a similar 2D texture space?
Nice question! From my understanding, there are many UV unwrapping algorithms that exist. A goal of these algorithms is to minimize distortion, but the texture will still be 2D. You can think of the algorithm as turning the sphere with its bumps into a triangle mesh, and then finding the correspondences from these triangles to the 2D texture space -- having a 1-to-1 mapping between the triangles in 3D and 2D.
By minimizing distortion, do you mean minimizing angular distortion or distance distortion?
@yzliu567 I think it would still be similar to this simplification because the elevation that the mountains and seas adds is negligible compared to the radius of the earth. In the same way, our world space would not be a perfect sphere, but the elevation change is negligible to where it would not make a significant difference.
Does the texture space need to be rectangular? In the case of a map, it makes sense to have it in a rectangular space because of readability, but it introduces a lot of problems like some countries might look larger than it's actual size. So if we were to code the function, is it optimal to make the texture space a rectangle, or does it not matter?