Spherical Textures

While working on Space Conflicts: Empires we had to create textures for spheres (eg. planets and stars). However a texture is a 2d rectangular image and mapping them on a sphere may cause distortions or seams. Therefore the texture needs to be "aware" of being mapped to sphere.

The easiest way to generate such a texture is to create a procedural texture in Blender which is applied to a sphere and "just" render it into a file.

• Put a camera inside a sphere
• Disable all lighting as otherwise the camera will only see black
• Switch to cycles as Eevee does not support the feature we need
• Change the camera projection mode to panorama. Which tells Blender to render a 360° view of the entire scene
• Render the image and store it into an image file
• Import this texture into Godot and apply it to a shader which is then applied to a sphere

Tada, a seamless spherical texture with no distortions.

This is what the actual texture then will look like:

Planar:

Spherical:

Source