Mapping a giant, non-square texture onto a sphere?

Hi all,

After flying through the Red and Blue books I still am completely in the dark how such a mundane task as mapping a model of the earth with a giant texture (such as the living earth texture) could be accomplished. That texture is not x^2 by y^2 in size. In order for it to be useful for me I need to be able to zoom in rather closely (i.e the equivalent of a few hundred km’s above surface), thus the high resolution texture requirement.

Does anyone have some ideas how this can be accomplished without spending the next 4 weeks obtaining a quick doctorate in OpenGL programming?

Thanks for any input/source code you may have!

Cheers

• Balt

You don’t necessarily need to use power of two textures.

Google ‘Texture Rectangles’…

Even your large texture can be used adhering to OpenGL’s power of 2 restriction - it’s done by scaling the image to a power of two and adjusting the texture coordinates (this is a pain though, and wastes valuable resources - use the tex rects).

You may also want to investigate ‘Level of Detail’ techniques.