I’m having some problems trying to create something like this:
I’ve heard of making a sphere mesh inside of Max/Maya and giving it two uv sets (one of the poles and one for the belly) and then cross fading between those UV sets in UE, but I’m not quite sure what the best way to achieve this is yet. These are going to be procedural planets and baking my maps to the sphere is not an option before someone suggests it.
Can anyone help me out with this?
There’s a few options, here’s one
Or you could do the same thing as above but with vertex colors controlling the blending instead of the texture.
Or use WorldAlignedTexture
Okay, so I had wondered if the coordinate index of the UV node could do what I wanted in regards to blending the UV sets. I’ll definitely give that a go, thanks.
Edit: You’re not using a cubemap are you? I see that the first UV channel is laid out in the shape of the cubemap and I’m not using cubemaps for my planets.
No, it’s not a cube map, it’s just like that to tile 4 times around the middle of the sphere. It’s a standard square texture. You could unwrap it anyway you want.
So there’s no distortion going on with your moon?
There’s minimal distortion, just a bit of stretching from UV mapping. Nothing noticeable.
Alright, thanks man. Definitely going to give this a whirl tomorrow, and I appreciate your help.
Some tip for making proper sphere for that mapping:
Create box first, slice every side to at least 4x4. Then Uv map all sides same way your texture is made, it is easier to adjust uvs on flat box sides. Then spherify it into ball.
If you want higher texture resolution, split that box into 6 separate material. one for each face.
Later if you want to add layer of clouds (and atmosphere shader) you need separate sphere mesh. For clouds it is best to make polar coordinate texture if you use spherified box you will have seams with any moving texture.
There was topic about making skybox, ATI and NVidia provide some tools to create spherical map out of 6 side textures.
This is very helpful information for me 
can you tell me how do you save or import these two UV channels into your sphere? thank you 
