I got a new render up from my ray tracer that applies planetary textures to spheres and makes them spin on their respective axes (none of the planets in our solar system spin on a “vertical” axis). I hope to do one with their orbits, but I haven’t had a chance to get to it; though, the nice thing is, I just have to define their paths and rotations as a function of time, and where I want the viewpoint to be. It took about 15 minutes to render in full HD 1080×1920 on 18 processors:
On 04.26.09, In computer science, By Dan
On 04.24.09, In computer science, By Dan
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.