Mesh looks really awful

I'm trying to modell the moon in blender. When I import it into Unity it looks REALLY awful.

What I tried before:

- Took a sphere
- map a res heightmap of the moon on it
-subdivided it until I get almost 65k triangles
- Used the displacement-modifier in blender to get mountains and craters
-smoothed it several times

The result looks like Capture1.jpg

Then

-I made a cube
-cast a sphere out of it
-mapped it again with one high res map
-subdivided it until I got almost 65k tris
-also smoothed it

The result still looks really ugly. When I cast the cube a little bit to like approach a sphere it looks a little bit better. The more cube-like shape doesn't matter as we walk on it.
But it still looks ugly... Capture0.jpg

Of course the result looks better the more I subdivide the sphere. But Unity only accepts 2^16 -1 (I always forget the exact number) triangles. So I would use 6 meshes instead of one to have each mesh 65k triangles. But using too much materials is bad for the peformance, isn't it?

I also tried it with 6 texture-patches and mapped them onto the cube (which I transformed to a sphere). The seams are even not visible. But when I put a normalmap on it, the seams become suddenly visible. Capture2 and Capture3.

I get the best result when I take a plane. Capture.jpg. But I haven't an idea yet how to make the player be able to go "around" like one would walk on a sphere.

So...what am I doing wrong...? I am not even sure whether I should better post this problem in a Blenderforum or not...
I want it to look good but keep a good performance of course. This one is really frustrating me....

 

You should have actual geometry for the basic shape and use a normal map for the really fine details.

 

Also here are people discussions various methods of unwrapping spheres.

http://polycount.com/discussion/69961/unwrapping-a-sphere

 

When I use another method to unwrap spheres I will still need a lot of geometry I think. But Unity only allows 65k tris and this insufficient to get good looking details.

 

I'm confused, why does doing a better unwrapping mean you need more geometry?

 

If you really want to go the geometry route (although, again I'm not sure why you would), you could look into tesselation.

 

Ehm....well because you posted a page about unrwapping spheres.
As I said I use in Blender the displacement-modifier to get ACTUAL craters and mountains.

 

I think we have a problem in communicating.

In any case.

You can either create a super high resolution planet in blender, then use a medium resolution planet in Unity and bake normal details from the super high resolution one to the med resolution one (by using something like xNormal).

Or, you can make a normal sphere and use a tesselation shader.

 

I already tried this before. I made a super high res version and baked a normalmap in blender. But it still looked like a raped potato with really crappy additional shadows.

This is something completely new to me.

 

Ok...so I just tried it again and baked a normalmap. The normalmap is really high detailed and 158 MB big! The diffusemap is about 9 MB. The resolutions are 8188x4096!
So it should still look good when I approach it. When I am relatively closed to it it immediately starts to look ugly again. The shadows are extremly crappy too...and even when I set the Max Size of the texture to 8192, it STILL LOOKS TERRIBLE!!!
what the hell am I doing wrong?

 

I can't tell just by those screens. It doesn't look like it has a normal map applied to me. How do your material settings do? How does your normal map look?

Also, if you use the same model and the same normal map in blender, does it look good?

 

There is one applied. It is 158 MB and the resolution of the normalmap is 8188x4096! Can I upload a file that is that big?
I use the Standardshader.

 

Does the same model with the same normal map look good in blender?

 

The left one is the one that is imported into Unity. I can't really tell.

 

ok...it already looks awful in blender....but I have no idea why.

 

I meant apply as a normal map, not as a color map. Drop down to "influence" in the texture settings in blender, uncheck color and check normal.

 

It looks totally different from what Unity shows.

 

I used 2k maps. I think it looks reasonable, so you should be able to get better results with 8k maps.

It's just a sphere, with an albedo map, a normal map (which I reduced the intensity quite a bit) and a detail normal map (which I made by combining a bunch of noises together) to add some fake detail.

It falls apart if I get somewhat closer, but I think it looks pretty decent.

 

That doesn't look like a normal map to me?

 

Ok so...what am I doing wrong? How did you exactly do this? Why does mine look so bad?
I unchecked color and checked normal, than I rendered. I don't know what else to do. And I posted the normal map above. It also looks bad when I use a normalmap that was generated with CrazyBump.

 

I don't know. I told you what I did. You should be getting better results than I'm getting with higher res maps.

Make sure you are doing the normal map generation correctly.

Also try adding a noisy normal map as detail.

 

Well..how did you generate the normalmap? With Blender? xNormals? CrazyBump?
Is that a screenshot from Unity? Or is it a rendered result in Blender?
You basically said that you have put a map onto a sphere. Yeah...this what I also do all the time....
Is it important to have seams to get good normalmaps? I try to avoid seams as I meantioned above. Because seams become visible. I seriously DO NOT know what I am doing wrong!
No matter what I do...it keeps looking awful.

I don't know how to make a noisy map.

 

That was a Unity screen yes.

I generated that normal map from a moon height map I found.

The colors of your normal map look off. It looks like the gamma is wrong.

Here is a test with some 8k map I just found here:

http://www.richardandersson.net/?p=331

 

I am about to cry right now! I want mine to look so good aswell!

 

Nope. I started a very new Unity project, put the heightmap from the page that you have posted onto the sphere. But it does not look as good as yours does. Could you please give a very very precise explanation about how you did it?

 

I changed the Filter Mode to Trilinear, Aniso Level to 16 for the color and the normalmap. Also override the MaxSize to 8192. It is the highest I can chose. Tried the format truecolor.
In the Projectsettings->Quality I set Anti-Aliasing to 8x, Ver High Resolution Shadows. The texture quality was already set to Full Res. I don't know what else to do.

 

Try lowering the intensities of the normal maps.

 

A value of 0.2 on the normal seems about right for the moon.



(edit: the left one is the real moon)

 

hm...not sure...

 

jop I found it and post it above your latest post. hm...still..
what normalmap did you use for the detailed one?
Btw I'm using the normalmap from the page you posted.

 

I use both maps from that page. Somehow it seems your albedo and normal don't match?

 

But...I use the two pictures from the page, too. How can't they match? Or is the UV-mapping completely wrong? I also tried it just apply it onto sphere primitive from unity. Happens the same.

 

Dunno, maybe one of the maps didn't finish downloading properly or something?

 

I downloaded the normalmap again. Still get pixely results. This sucks. Is that maybe because of my display?

 

If you zoom too much, of course it's going to go pixelly.

For the sync issue, it's probably the albedo map, which is huge. Open it in photoshop or gimp or whatever and see if everything is okay with the map and see if it syncs with the normal map there.

Play with the detail maps. Try things.

 

Even from a higher distance it looks pixely. I don't get these fine details like you.
And it should not be pixely when I approach the moon as I will be able to fly to the moon and land on it. This is like LOD 1.
Don't know how to check if it syncs....I will have a look...

 

With just a couple of maps, it's never going to look high fidelity enough to be able to land on it and have it still look decent.

 

how many maps would I need? I just can add 2 Maps with the Standardshader. The shader with most textures as input that I found is the 6-sided shader.

 

Do some research. I'm off.