Animated Planet Textures
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Hey Folks,
Throwing a question out there for everyone: Can you make animated planet textures? Say, I wanted to make a cloud layer move around a planet, is that possible? I know animated textures are used within FL, I just don’t know if they can be done with the planets.
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I tried this before, I failed because I used the cubic method of texturing the planet and the textures would have been impossible to match up. Although i never tried it again i still think it could be done. I’ve thought of a few way’s of doing it, even just a .CMP with 2 sphere’s, inner and outer. The outer having the cloud layer and just adding a rotation animation onto it.
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Yes, it is possible but not with SPH due to the aformentioned texture mapping of SPH objects. It is perfectly possible, however, if you use a CMP with a cylindrical mapping method for the clouds. IMHO, it isnt worth the effort and sorta looks like crap.
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Nice idea you got there! You can do it with 2 different models: 1 is the planet - spinning slowly, and another is the cloud sphere - spinning twice as fast as the planet. In souch case, the cloud sphere must be a little bigger than the planet to not mix with it. Try it.
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I did that years ago, but to be honest it doesn’t look all that good and you encounter odd errors when you view the model from afar.
This is especially problematic with very large planets.
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cough Material Animations cough
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If you can figure the deltas out to make a storm travel around the atmosphere, while spinning, I’d love to see that
Mixing mesh and mat anims gives a rather wide range of possibilities and is relatively easy.wow I just almost swallowed the screw from the bottom of my pepper mill
Which is what I’d been thinking about for a binary star model, and a little niftier black hole that swirls and sucks ( sounds like a naughty solar :oops: ) instead of just spinning. Apply this to the hurricane idea above and you have some nifty storm stuff going on. It’d look pretty sweet, particularly on huge gas planets like Jupiter with that gnarly “eye” which both circumnavigates and spins. Might take some work aligning the “eye” section with the right band on the texture, but it’d be another cool touch for our travelers to break the monotony of barren space flight.
Recall that binary star orbits are wobbly because of gravity and centri(whichever)al forces wobbling them throughout the rotation. Without mat and mesh anim together, more accurate portrayal isn’t possible. Mat anim can handle the task of the gas exchange between binaries; then your dual star model with an offset axis can rotate around an invisible poly with its own offset axis.
Anyways, just saying, why not use all the tools available? Flying through space with static planets gets boring.
//offers CoT some antihistamine//
