I have been able to create a planet using a tutorial; I basically created a sphere, then wrapped it with a material skin of the planet. I’m trying to figure out how I can do rings around a planet now.
I’ve attached a ring file that I’d like to use. In theory, it seems like I should be able to make a 2nd sphere then wrap these around it, though in practice, it didn’t pan out. I ended up with a mostly white sphere that just covered up the planet’s normal coloring.
Can anyone offer some direction?
I think it mostly depends on what this is for. The first thing that comes to mind for me is to make a ring and just parent it to your sphere. Easiest way, is to create a cylinder in any 3d software, delete the tops, flatten, then scale the inner vertices to be smaller until you have a nice ring. Like so:
That being said… it’s a tad bit difficult to give you a great answer since we don’t know the intended result. Will it be viewed from multiple angles? Could you get away with a 2D image? Do the rings need to be texture on the planet mesh rather than an extra model? etc.
It’s going to be rendered in 3d, seen from any angle. Hoping to keep it simple enough to re-use it for other planets.
Awesome then the method I presented above should work great. In terms of reusing it, make sure you are utilizing the template functionality so you place the sphere with ring as its child:
https://developer.playcanvas.com/en/user-manual/templates/
For the material, I would probably setup a black and white opacity mask unless you are wanting the white background of that texture to be on the rings. In order to do that, drop that texture into any photo editing software (photoshop in this example), select by color and click on the white. Go ahead and fill that selection in black and then invert the selection and fill everything else in white. That should get you pretty close though it make take some fiddling with the selection thresholds and feathering the selections.
Your texture map could probably be much smaller than it is if you were to make it tile. A 512x512 texture tiled across the ring would probably look great depending on how hi-fidelity the project is. Could probably get away with even less.
Good luck!
