CompuServe Thread

#Bend Map Obj to Sphere?

3 messages in this thread
#161994From: Brent BonetMar 31, 1995 4:48 PM
I'm creating an animation with the world spinning and a zoom or fly down to a particular city. Using a texture map would have to be a huge bitmap, so since the mapping of the object would be a basic green, I'd like to loft a thin object with the continents, map it with green and wrap it around a sphere. Is this possible? This would allow me to zoom in without any problems with material quality or memory size. Brent Bonet – POP! Multimedia Atlanta
#162922From: Brandon BartlettApr 4, 1995 9:53 PM
You could always fake it by zooming in so far and then passing through the clouds as some sort of transition, then using your close up image or even a seperate set of objects for the "up close" fly-by part. Just a thought… Best Regards, Brandon DesignTec – Boaz, Alabama
#164060From: Christopher MartinApr 11, 1995 12:17 AM
We are just about to finish a 30 second TV spot for the local cable company where we had to fight these same battles. Brandon's suggestion is exactly what we ended up doing. We used seperate project files for the close view of the city and the far away shot from a satellite. We tried several transitions and ended up with: pulling back out from the city and passing by and eventually thru "blob" modeled clouds. We then cross faded into the far away view of planet Earth. The cross fade was about 60 frames with motion occuring in both shots. I think it works well. Two big benefits are that the project file sizes are more controllable and you don't need a huge bit map to zoom into. In fact we used the bigwld.gif map (which is floating around on the forum somewhere) and actually reduced the size of the map.