Planet/Moon Polar Distortion...

Chris2005

I've found countless tutorials on making planet textures, but none address how to make the polar ends distort so they don't get crimped at the poles...

How do I do that?

spacefighter

perhaps try having two different materials on the planet model, one for the equatorial through to the "arctic circle" and one for the the very polar regions. make both materials identical except for texturing. map the texture of the polar regions differently to the texture of the equatorial regions, perhaps even do it face by face manually aligning parts of the polar texture image, and having it's centre at the pole rather than, as would happen from a single texture mapped over the sphere, having all the points on the top edge of the image converge at the north pole and all the points on the bottom edge converge at the south pole. GIMP (or photoshop) would help with making sphere mapped images , for equatorial regions make a full planetary surface (make the poles on this view for now) and give it sphere mapping to distort it into the right shape to cover the sphere. For polar regions have the pole at the centre of a sphere mapped picture and design the edges of the image so they match with where the polar and equatorial textures will meet, you could design these pole textures so they have a centre circle with detail and the alpha regions round it. Also if you do this a well placed hadley cell (part of a climate system on earth like planets) might give an excuse to have a cloudy band obscuring the ring where the polar and equatorial textures meet.