Hi!

Sorry about my beginner’s stupidity to 3ds Max. I’m looking for a method to project geographical coordinates of the earth onto a sphere. The purpose of this is to assign an object to a sphere wich represents the earth.

There wasn’t anything on the web to get on with.

Does one of you know such a method, e.g. via MaxScript? Or Tutorial?

Any reply will be appreciated.

Respects
Sebastian

Not exactly sure what you are doing. Do you mean the Latitude and Longitude coords? The sphere’s wireframe edges can be a guide. For example, if the sphere has 36 segments, each edge will be at 10 degrees. If you are mapping a grid, or map to the sphere, use spherical mapping, unless the map is in Mercator projection, in that case use cylindrical mapping.

Thanks for your reply!

Yes, I mean longitude and latitude coordinates. But it is not about material mapping but placing an object e.g. a plain or sphere on the surface of a sphere that represents our earth.

Let’s assume I have a sphere, with spherical earth texture. And coords of NY would fit to that texture on the sphere.

seb

To get your object on the sphere’s surface, at specific coords, you first need to create your object and place it on the surface at a known point. A good place may be at the intersection of the Equator and the Greenwich Meridian, since this is the 0,0, datum of the Lat Long coord system. That’s on the front middle of the sphere, or on the map, off the west coast of Africa in the Gulf of Guinea, south of Ghana, west of Gabon (see pic 1). Assuming the sphere is at the scene origin, you can draw your object, let’s say a plain, in the front viewport with grid snap on, or right click the position spinners to zero it to the centre, or use the align tool. Once it is at the sphere’s centre, move it forward the disance of the sphere’s radius till it’s on the surface. As I mentioned before, giving the sphere 36 segments (or any convinient factor of 360) and viewing in Edged Face or Wireframe, may help you visualise the coords on the sphere.
To place the plain at the given cooords, you need to rotate it about the spheres centre pivot, that many degrees in that direction. To rotate about the centre you can either, pick the sphere’s coord system in rotate mode, move the plain’s pivot to the sphere’s centre, or create a helper at the sphere’s centre then attach the plain to it then rotate the helper.
So let’s say the coords you want are for New York, which in decimal degrees, according to Max’s own daylight presets are 40.67N 73.944W. Right click the rotate tool and first rotate your object to the north (-X) 40.67 degrees, then rotate it west (-Z) 73.944 degrees. It should now be over NY on the globe (see pic 2).

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