One of the downsides of using a simplistic 3D modeling software is that it may lack some of the needed capabilities. One of these capabilities that I needed was a way to map a texture to a sphere.
Imagine having a 2D image of earth and then wrapping that around a sphere. Each vertex of the sphere will need to know the pixel that it should be mapped to, so it can be rendered correctly. This is pretty simple for most 3D modeling software, but I couldn’t figure it out nor could I find any instructions on how to do this with SketchUp.
Luckily, I found an tutorial written by James of barnabu.co.uk with instructions of how to use the freeware Anim8or to create and map a sphere then import that into SketchUp.
Here’s is one of my simple spherical characters from a simple 3D game I was messing around with. The characters have two spheres for their bodies: head and torso. You can see that the face wraps around the head sphere. There’s no clothing on the torso yet, so it’s just a solid render.
When loading this into XNA, you can change the textures at run time, so as long as I have one character model (2 spheres), I can switch the textures for head and clothing to create an large collection of characters without having to reprocess anything other than just the textures.
Just read your post for the first time, looks great:) Gonna have a look at the rest of your blog!
Good old Google scetch up. It realy is an excelent tool just a pity it costs so much:( Thanks for the tut!
This can all be done using the free edition of Google SketchUp.