Creating planet Earth for Oculus Rift

Hello,

I've made Earth in Unity by following this tutorial:

The planet looks great on my screen, but not so much when I bring the camera close to the Earth or if I scale up the Earth, which is something I both need to do for my Oculus Rift project.

The resolution of the Earth texture used is 8192 x 4096. I've tried importing a higher resolution texture but Unity was unable to read it and besides 4096 is the max for Unity I think.

My question is: How do I create a planet with a very high resolution texture? Is there something like tiling I can use? If so, are there any tutorials online that you would recommend to a noob developer like me?

Thanks.

 

See Proland from scrawkblog.

 

I contacted a developer who made a demo that had planets that had non-pixelated textures. His advice was what I was following before by setting 'True Image' and 4096 for resolution. So, I knew what I was doing was perfectly fine except for the distance.

My compromise was to make the planet a bit more distant, which worked out fine for the project.

 

split it into multiple textures/meshes that are all 4096

 

Rather than using bigger textures or splitting the mesh I would use a Normal map and Specular textures. This way you could even get away with smaller textures but get a better looking shading effect.
If that's not enough then add an extra sphere as a cloud layer with an alpha texture to make the planet look more complex and animated.