I've got a tileable texture that I made in Photoshop... I can map it to sphere right now, but there's that distortion near the poles and mid section of the sphere. Is there anything I can do to the texture in Photoshop to get rid of the distortion, or just make it seamless all the way around the texture? The texture is 256x256, tileable... so there must be a way. Also, instead of making a new thread for this I'll just put the question here. How do you think I would create an engine effect like shown here: http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=199826 .... I tried particles and they kinda work, but it doesn't look as good. Any ideas? Thanks! [edited by - LlamaGuy on January 20, 2004 10:18:50 PM]

Distort your texture. The poles have a much smaller radius then the center, so the detail is going to need to be more spread out, since it will be compresed on the sphere.

That distortion will always occur, you should strech the texture towards the top and bottom, but it is not required.

I used particle's to create that engine effect.

[edited by - skow on January 20, 2004 10:35:51 PM]

Ooooh, word from the creater, cool... Nevermind about the sphere thing, I found a great tutorial... http://www.lizardlounge.com/Pages/C4D/tutorials/sphericalMap/ in case anyone's interested.

But, about the particles... how many are you making each frame? How did you get it so the engine's flame has a defined cone line that? The closest I got was creating a particle with 0 speed every frame right on my engine, but since frame rates vary, the engine flickers... Any suggestions?

[edited by - LlamaGuy on January 20, 2004 12:03:22 AM]

Well you can create the texture in a program like Darktree that will generate it so it streches the exact amount to account for the distortion. I persionally am not worried about correcting for it. I see it as having more detail towards the poles, and there is nothing wrong with that (unless its noticable diffrent).

As far as the particle trail I have an algorythm that creates a particle every so many frames, or if the frame rate is low enough it creates 2+ a frame. The particles are stationary, the effect could be done with a single texture billboarded properly but it doesnt curve whent he ship does turns and rolls.

You replied as soon as I edited =P. Ok, that algorithm sounds simple enough to duplicate... I''ll see what I can do, thanks guys.