Tilt the Texture of a Planet

[Sigma88]

I'm trying to do this thing for a while now, and I already have decent results.

But I thought to ask here just in case someone more expert than me in texture editing could have some good tip to share.

basically, some time ago I decided to make a planet look like it has 90° tilt into KSP.

this can only be achieved (as far as I know) by using a texture that makes the planet look like it has a tilt.

this is the original planet

http://i.imgur.com/AuZRgk0.png

and this is the result

http://i.imgur.com/PIghcK2.png

since it's a gas giant it was pretty easy to do, and the result is quite good.

the problem is, when I try to do the same with one of it's moons

(original here http://i.imgur.com/5wqhv2y.png)

I can't get a good result.

is there anyone with image editing skills that would know a good way to do that.

my best result currently is this one

http://i.imgur.com/hN5cVpE.png

once loaded into KSP the ridge looks perfect, but the central bit is stretched.

anyone has any Idea on how I could approach this?

thanks to anyone that can help me with this

btw, for Reference:

original planet and moon are from Outer Planets Mod

and this is my mod that Tilts them

Edited August 5, 2015 by Sigma88

[_Augustus_]

Hmm. I once tried doing this to Urlum before you did and had the problem you have with Wal.

[Porkjet]

Just a guess, seems to me like this distortion was already present in the original, caused by original spherical distortion at the poles which is kinda difficult to compensate for when working in 2D, and your method itself is probably flawless and just copies over the original faulty poles to the equator. If this is the case I can't think of any other solution than manual photoshop retouch magic (might be a problem to sync this across the different map types)

Just for curiosity, what's your method of tilting the textures?

[Sigma88]

Just a guess, seems to me like this distortion was already present in the original, caused by original spherical distortion at the poles which is kinda difficult to compensate for when working in 2D, and your method itself is probably flawless and just copies over the original faulty poles to the equator. If this is the case I can't think of any other solution than manual photoshop retouch magic (might be a problem to sync this across the different map types)

Just for curiosity, what's your method of tilting the textures?

If I use gimp to transform the texture from rectangular to polar I get nice looking poles but ....ty equator.

Using my method I can keep the equator almost flawless but the poles are a bit distorted.

The result with the latter is overall better than the former. But still I think it should be possible to improve it.

I'm just not as good with texture editing as I need

-edit-

added stuff

for tilting the textures I've used different methods,

the first one I used was for urlum (gas giant linked in the post above)

you can see here what I did for urlum:

1- starting texture

2- split in two halves

3- rotated 180° bottom half

4- resized both halves into squares

5- Rectangular to Polar

6- Pinch

7- Rotate 45°

8- put back together the two halves

when I try to do this for wal I get the distortion on the new poles.

with the new method (picture of Wal on the post above) I can get everything fine except for the new equator has some distortion where the textures of the old poles are.

Edited August 7, 2015 by Sigma88

[Tellion]

Sigma, you might want to clear your inbox

I don't think that the texture contains much distortion per se, so it *should* be possible to remap it without introducing additional artifacts, but I have lots of trouble visualizing the process...

Apart from that a forum dedicated to mapping or image editing might be of more help to you. I found a good deal of interesting info here, so maybe ask those guys.

[Sigma88]

cleared

btw, tried that forum but I cant register since (apparently) I'm a spambot

solved

Edited August 7, 2015 by Sigma88

[Sigma88]

I managed to do it

thanks everybody for the help, even tho I ultimately did it myself

If you want to check out the result, the link is in my signature (Sigma Mod Expansions)

cheers

PS: I guess this thread can be closed