It’s all well and good to be able to render shapes in space in a photorealistic way, but at some point you’d like to draw something that doesn’t have just one surface color. After all, a billboard isn’t just a bunch of shapes each of which has one color – it’s one object with paint / ink placed on it in an ordered way.
Texturing accomplishes by taking a primitive shape (like a sphere, triangle, surface of revolution, etc.) and wrapping an image onto and over it. Let’s consider a sphere in space:
A white sphere in space.
Now let’s say we mean it to be Earth. Then we can take a picture of Earth that’s flat:
Flattened map of Earth
and then map it onto a sphere to get a picture of what we all know Earth to look like:
Behold!
Two Mars globes where the left is what is seen with the eye, and the right is a topographic map.
That is pretty cool.
There is a project at sourceforge for providing real time cloud maps.
(http://xplanet.sourceforge.net/clouds.php)
Nice. I did a quick render with one of their pictures, but was disappointed with how lackluster it looked without color. But I did find some links from there that worked out pretty well for textures for other planets (see most recent post).
Could you add (or whatever it’s called…screen maybe) the pictures together and then render it.