Texturing Spheres Part 2
Besides the UV spheres there are Ico Spheres. The difference is in how the faces of the sphere are organized. On the left a UV sphere and on the right a Ico sphere.
The Ico sphere looks very different but the image shows a Ico Sphere with only 2 subdivisions. Using Blender you can create Ico Spheres with more subdivisions making the sphere much smoother:
The smoothed Ico Sphere with 4 subdivisions looks exactly like a UV sphere but the object size is smaller (103.2kB vs 78.6kB). Significant if you are using a lot of spheres in a project. The Ico Sphere is build out of triangles instead of the quads of the UV sphere. No translation needed for quads to triangles. Rendering should be faster.
Just like the UV spheres we can use different projections for the spheres:
The unchanged sphere with the text shows the slices that are 'glued' together to form the sphere, just like the unchanged UV sphere. The cylinder projection shows it's value again for textures that need to retain a horizontal line.
I especially like the Ico Sphere with 2 subdivisions unwrapped and with a wood texture. The wood grains in the triangles look really nice!
Eight Ico Sphere models are added to the Shapes library:
Ico Sphere 2sd (sd = sudivisions)
Ico Sphere 3sd
Ico Sphere 4sd
Ico Sphere 4sd smoothed
Ico Sphere 2sd unwrapped
Ico Sphere 2sd cube projection
Ico Sphere 2sd sphere projection
Ico Sphere 2sd cylinder projection
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