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Properly applying a texture to a Geosphere....

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Hello everyone,

Still working on my aMazing Balls TD map.

As some of you already know, the creeps in this TD are Balls.

Until now, I used a modified Units\Human\Kael\BloodelfBall.mdx (the 3 rotating spheres) model that is in fact billboarded. A simple plane with a texture to give the illusion of a sphere.

I removed all effects, kept the plane, added attachment points, a collision sphere, then I used a texture i made after tinkering under Photoshop for a few hours (yes I am nothing like a pro).
Here is the texture I have been using :
Ball.png

In all fairness, the result was quite nice visually !

But there were issues with the billboarded Balls.

As this is a 2D model, it had occlusion and transparency issues. Especially when I tried to combine this model with other ones (some parts of Mythic's Starfall Empire models).

So I ended up making a simple Geosphere model under Blender (I barely know how to use this, just found the way to create a Geosphere primitive with a smooth effect) then exported it as Obj, and imported it in my 2D Ball model to replace the plane.

And it works great, with the exception of the texture.

Reading around, I found out that when you want to "unwrap" a disc to a square image, you need to distort it using Polar Coordinates.

I did that in Photoshop, but the result is quite dirty and looks really bad. Worse, even if i ignored the bugs in the resulting texture, I could not fit the texture properly with the UV Mapping utility in Retera Model Studio Reforge Hack.

So now I am condemned to use a basic texture, and if it is better than nothing, the result is far from being as acceptable visually :
NewBall.png


In other words, my new "Balls" now look like this :
NewBall.png

As you can see it is much less appealing than the old version.

So now, at last and as you can guess, my question is :
How can I make my new 3D Balls have the same look as my old 2D Balls ?

How can I properly transform my original Texture to properly be able to apply it to my 3D Ball model ?

I have attached the model to this post.
The path the model uses for the texture is :
"Custom Textures\NewBall.blp"

A huge thank you to anyone able to solve this problem, as this is beyond my capabilities.


EDIT : Nevermind, after hours of research, I finally found a solution. You can ignore this question
For those who would face the same issue as myself, I would advise to use that freeware Photoshop plugin :
Spherical Mapping Corrector – Richard Rosenman Advertising & Design
 

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