Different Types Of 3D Mapping
Remember all those discussions in geography class about the difference between a map of the world and a globe of the world? The idea was that a map of the world stretched and distorted the countries near the poles to make a flat representation; thus, Antarctica and those northern European countries seemed huge.
Only after you examined a globe of the world did those landmasses take on their actual size.
A globe has "pinched" poles.
This is how spherical mapping works; the 3D application pinches the poles of the map as it wraps around an object.
Notice that spherical mapping can work effectively on nonspherical objects.
Cylindrical: Cylindrical mapping is wrapping the texture around an object in one direction.
It is the blanket of those "pigs in a blanket" you used to make in Boy or Girl Scouts.
This mapping technique works well with bottles or cans.
It does not work very well with most complex forms, however, because of the lack of texturing on tops and bottoms.
Flat Mapping: If you ever attended the popular The Rocky Horror Picture Show and saw all the folks dressed up as characters jump up on stage in front of the screen, you may have noticed how the movie fell across the forms of their bodies.
Flat mapping (sometimes also called projection or planar mapping) works in the same way, except that when the fans were facing the projector, their backside was in shadow, while an object that is using flat mapping shows the texture as well.
It is as if there is a texture gun that is shooting color that can pierce through objects as though they were blocks of glass.
The texture on the opposite side is a mirror image of how the texture appears on the front of the object.
This method works well with floors or walls, shapes that are essentially one plane.
Cubic mapping is similar to flat mapping, except that (using the projector analogy) there are six projectors, one for each plane of a cube.
This works very well for objects that are indeed squarish in shape-like a cube.
This method does not work so well for round objects, as it makes the seams of where one projector's image ends and the next one begins too obvious.
Only after you examined a globe of the world did those landmasses take on their actual size.
A globe has "pinched" poles.
This is how spherical mapping works; the 3D application pinches the poles of the map as it wraps around an object.
Notice that spherical mapping can work effectively on nonspherical objects.
Cylindrical: Cylindrical mapping is wrapping the texture around an object in one direction.
It is the blanket of those "pigs in a blanket" you used to make in Boy or Girl Scouts.
This mapping technique works well with bottles or cans.
It does not work very well with most complex forms, however, because of the lack of texturing on tops and bottoms.
Flat Mapping: If you ever attended the popular The Rocky Horror Picture Show and saw all the folks dressed up as characters jump up on stage in front of the screen, you may have noticed how the movie fell across the forms of their bodies.
Flat mapping (sometimes also called projection or planar mapping) works in the same way, except that when the fans were facing the projector, their backside was in shadow, while an object that is using flat mapping shows the texture as well.
It is as if there is a texture gun that is shooting color that can pierce through objects as though they were blocks of glass.
The texture on the opposite side is a mirror image of how the texture appears on the front of the object.
This method works well with floors or walls, shapes that are essentially one plane.
Cubic mapping is similar to flat mapping, except that (using the projector analogy) there are six projectors, one for each plane of a cube.
This works very well for objects that are indeed squarish in shape-like a cube.
This method does not work so well for round objects, as it makes the seams of where one projector's image ends and the next one begins too obvious.
