Hey guys… for my spaceship piloting game I’m looking for ways to create a very large Earth model. I have read a bit about procedural meshes. Do you think it is a feasible idea to generate a big procedural 2d plane, and then curve it so it looks like part of a sphere? Then do something with UVs to apply textures to it?
For instance, when landed, I would have a 2d circular mesh with the spaceship in the center and stretching a few kilometers away… and as the player flies upwards, it deforms into a curve, and eventually a half-sphere (for sunlight shading and hopefully atmospheric effects based on the normals).
At the same time, i would need to calculate UVs and apply many textures to the mesh… i have satellite imagery of earths surface which is ~10gb, and I could precalculate mipmaps from that database, I think the major unknown and difficult part is calculating UVs and addressing the right texture files and applying them to the mesh based on the players position and altitude.
Maybe deformation isn’t needed at all?
Any thoughts on this approach? Is there an easier/more effective way to go about this?