Celestia Forums

I am trying to model Saturn's moon Pandora, since high resolution images have been released from a Cassini flyby a few months ago. Does anyone have experience with programs that would let me map a partial texture of the surface to a model? I have some experience with Blender, but its mostly been modeling without texturing. I'm just bad at visualizing how Blender's UV editing system works.

Cheers

I think you don't need that in Celestia. Make a surface texture in Gimp and you need a cmod format model of Pandora. You can manipulate the surface texture in Gimp, if it is not at right place.

That's very much try and error though. I don't think you will get good results with that method... Projecting the images on a model in blender might be a better solution, but no idea how this works.

If the texture is not at the right location, then it is not a modeling problem, it is a texture problem...But yes, in Blender you can edit the texture in real time (I think).

FYI, I notice this script to export a 'cmod' format file from Blender.

https://www.blender.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8352

The Celestia utility cmodview is purported to be able to import obj format and export it to cmod, obviating the need to use special export scripts in your favorite 3D design program (including Blender or Anim8or) since most modeling programs can export to obj format (which includes both meshes and surface texture maps).

I have to write "purported" because cmodview doesn't work at all on my computer

the antique blender plugin is for blender 2.49b
the last version before the API change in 2.5 and 2.6 now 2.77

the cmodview code in my github page builds and works fine on my linux os
-- should build just fine using MinGW ( MS's Visual Studio ????? unknown )

and it dose import COMPLEX obj uv mapped meshes

now as to Pandora , most software assumes a "perfect" sphere .
Pandora is NOT

According to "cpck_rock_21Jan2011_merged.tpc" it is -- in Km -- ( 51.5 X 39.8 X 32.0 )

and there is a shapemodel from stooke
"EAR-A-5-DDR-STOOKE-SHAPE-MODELS-V1.0"
imported into blender




isis3 can use a dem to remap it and so can the current dev version of Qgis
Qgis uses GDAL and you can use a non earth dem to re-project a image to a simple cylindrical map