Could we get cubemaps?

[ItsJustLuci]

Hello there,

I was wondering if it would be possible to implement cubemap support for planets into an update at some point. I really would love to see this, since the DDS format (a texture format used by most if not all unity games) has a max resolution of just 16k. This works fine if your planets are kerbin sized, but when you have bigger planets it can look somewhat stretched. With cubemaps in theory you could have textures up to 64k in resolution in addition to having no stretching at the poles. this would allow for much greater quality and clarity in the textures of larger planets.

Thanks so much for your time.

Here's an example of what I mean. For anyone who may not know, cubemaps allow for this kind of clarity. but currently this is done by a mod called RVE64K for RSS using a workaround, so it doesn't load properly when not in orbit or in the map view.

[jrodriguez]

I think this will be an awesome add-on. Cubemaps is the way to go when a high resolution map is needed and Earth is such a case!

 

[hypervelocity]

I fully second the motion!!! 

[Wackenhut]

i vote yes... great idea

[spicyspace]

I vote yes, this would let mod creators make beautiful textures! 

[Superfluous J]

We already have it for the skybox, so why not?

[ItsJustLuci]

2 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

We already have it for the skybox, so why not?

exactly, thank you!

2 hours ago, spicyspace said:

I vote yes, this would let mod creators make beautiful textures! 

the tools to develop cubemap textures for mod developers are... complicated. I'm trying to figure that out myself rn, and will post a tutorial when/if I am successful

[HafCoJoe]

If you want to use Cubemaps right now you can try out EVE, it has support for cubemap textures right now, and there is even the mod RVE64k that adds 64k cloud and surface textures to Earth in RSS. It isn't a permanent solution, but it does have the feature right now if you are interested in doing something with it

[ItsJustLuci]

11 hours ago, Avera9eJoe said:

If you want to use Cubemaps right now you can try out EVE, it has support for cubemap textures right now, and there is even the mod RVE64k that adds 64k cloud and surface textures to Earth in RSS. It isn't a permanent solution, but it does have the feature right now if you are interested in doing something with it

Hey! I am actually working on something somewhat similar here but I am facing limitations in software, and personal knowledge/experience. The other major thing is that I can't make ground textures, neither can RVE64k, what that mod is doing is loading textures as clouds so they appear as terrain from orbit. Pingopete expressed  (paraphrasing out of memory here) that it was basically impossible to get them working at ground level due to the way ksp does textures, which is why I made this thread. However, if you do have experience working with textures I would really love some help over at my other forum post because I am trying to make 64k textures for at least 4 other planetary bodies, maybe more to come soon

 

[HafCoJoe]

2 hours ago, ItsJustLuci said:

Hey! I am actually working on something somewhat similar here but I am facing limitations in software, and personal knowledge/experience. The other major thing is that I can't make ground textures, neither can RVE64k, what that mod is doing is loading textures as clouds so they appear as terrain from orbit. Pingopete expressed  (paraphrasing out of memory here) that it was basically impossible to get them working at ground level due to the way ksp does textures, which is why I made this thread. However, if you do have experience working with textures I would really love some help over at my other forum post because I am trying to make 64k textures for at least 4 other planetary bodies, maybe more to come soon

 

Ahh gotcha I wasn't aware of that. I don't know about cubemap planet textures, but I do know a fair amount about cubemap clouds since I used them as often as possible in Spectra:

These two textures are actually six faces of a cube, each face mapped to either Red, Green or Blue, and using black to add alpha. It's a very clean way to compress high resolution (originally 8192x4096) textures into a much smaller file size (2x 2048x2048), however it only works for things that don't have color.

 

Edited June 17, 2020 by Avera9eJoe

[pingopete]

Hey there, sorry for the late response, It's been a little while since I did the textures for RVE64k and it was basically a horrific mess of experimentation with different software, I can say that I tried or used the following for generating cubemaps and all I can really add is to experiment with them or read up on how they work yourself:

CubeTheSphere, Hugin, CubeMaker, CompositeImageEditor and PanoTools, I think in the end I used Hugin which has a pretty difficult UI but has some pretty powerful functions if you can get past that, SpaceEngine has a reaaally powerful tool for compiling thousands of square cubemap sections into various types of cube map textures and viceversa: http://spaceengine.org/manual/making-addons/planet-textures/

Hope this helps although I know it's pretty hazy info, let me know if there's anything else I can give you info on