Crappy Mappy

[TheBlackHole]

Can someone help me? I'm trying to make an entry for Unknown Moons, but my gas giant is a piece of crap because of the mapping. First I tried spherical, but that didn't work. Now I'm trying Through Camera, but from another camera off to the left somewhere. And the large moon's too bright.

[Henry Blewer]

The camera you are mapping from should be more in front of the render camera. The too bright moon, I would darken the coloring,; it may be the easiest way to fix that.

Overall, this is a good start. Keep at it.

[TheBlackHole]

But then how would I get a "spherical" effect? Like in wetbanana's (I think) Mesa? I might have to rely on Photoshop to save this pic like I did with my asteroids... How do I do GOOD spherical projection??  I'm already putting the center of the map at the center of the planet, but that's not working! 

[Oshyan]

Is your original image actually in a spherical projection? If not, then mapping it spherically won't work right. In that case what is the source of your image? If it's just a photo of a planet, then front projection is the only thing that will work and it will be difficult to get it to look good.

- Oshyan

[TheBlackHole]

I actually made the map from a spherical map of Jupiter. I moved some features around, removed others, and colored the whole thing pink. The gas giant in my renderings is called Dgnyre. It was originally Degnir (ringeD backwards) and was in the Proxima system (I got the original idea from Far Gate) but then I moved it to the Xprrrah system, a system I came up with. Then I changed the spelling and eventually removed the rings for Terragen, but left them there in Celestia.

[Oshyan]

If it was originally a spherical map and your changes weren't too severe, then spherical mapping on the planet should work. Just set it to spherical and set the position of the image to the planet's position.

- Oshyan

[TheBlackHole]

I already tried that! I'm doing a render with the original spherical settings with the map centered on the planet, to show you what crap it looks like with it.

[TheBlackHole]

  It's not crap anymore! 

[TheBlackHole]

Now the only crap I have to put up with is the black spots on my moons!

[Henry Blewer]

Those black spots look like shadows to me. The gas giant does look much better, good work. Sometimes when I do large scale displacement on a terrain, black spots appear. Try using a value about 1/2 of the scale of the displacement, plugged into a compute normal, or the compute terrain. If that does not work increase it by 1/5 increments until the black areas stop being rendered.

[TheBlackHole]

I tried working on a ring, but it didn't work. I'll remove it and then thin the moon's atmophere.