Our first frontier.

     So, I was a little bored today and decided to play with texture mapping on a sphere. It was a lot easier then I thought. The geometry is simple enough. It's just a sphere and I made a little flying saucer for fun. which was a torus and half a sphere. The stars were created using the world settings.

     Then I proceeded to take screen shots of the renders while moving the camera about for different effect. What I really need to know is, how do I make the geometry not show through the mapping? Also, how do you minimize the reflection of light on the mapping, for example, real earth won't reflect the lamp on it....

     I really liked this little project. I think I would like to work on this a bit more another day. It would be fun to make a solar system animation with the camera zooming and weaving in and out between the planets then crashing into the sun.

     This one, I purposely left the lamp on the other side of the earth to show the "night/day" style picture. Makes it look like the sun is about to rise on this watched portion of earth.

    All in all, I really enjoyed this little project. If you have any ideas or advice on how to solve the issues mentioned above, please let me know via comment!

     -Eric

EDIT:

I got the geometry to smooth out and the light to stop reflecting! woot!

     Much better.