How to render a textured, normal-mapped sphere or planet in Unreal or HLSL. Complete with atmosphere and without resorting to raymarching.

Anja Petry

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The post discusses the challenges of texturing a sphere and explores the use of a flat disk for texture mapping instead of a UV sphere. It covers the process of creating a pixel shader to recreate the features of a 3D UV sphere mesh and provides insights into surface equations, texture mapping, orientation, rotation, shading, UV discontinuities, polar patches, and atmospheric rendering.

Sphere Rendering