Representing a sphere with icosahedrons?

How would one be able to do this? Does JME 3 support this? Or should I just come up with my own mathematics to shape the sphere myself?

https://wiki.jmonkeyengine.org/jme3/advanced/shape.html

Or just create whatever you want in blender

Yeah I made one a while back. If you want the normals too, they are the same as the positions at a radius of 1.

I went down this same route. Procedurally making an icosphere isn’t really “hard” persay. But there are a number of little “gotchas”. I ended up making the sphere a set 10 meshes each a pair of 2 triangles.

Also what @jayfella said is absolutely true. Since you have a single “origin” point for a sphere calculating the normals is a snap.

One tool that I found SUPER handy for figuring out the math was the website Wolfram Alpha. I used it to help figure out which vertice connected to another vertice when assembling the point cloud.

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Thank you! Yeah I need this kind of sphere because I’ll be going from this sphere as well as a flat map. Why? To show different projections of a map and a sphere.

Interesting… what is your actual 2D projection?

Because there are way better shapes to use for 3D to 2D projection that are more straight-forward than icosahedrons (which are actually quite tricky to map to 2D).

For some reason I seem to recall that someone did this in jME 2 a while back. Let me see if I can dig up that thread.

Side note I hear ya on the map projections. It’s been a pet peeve of mine in Civilization that the world is a cylinder. I was using the icosphere to this end (still chipping away at it).

Hm. Only found this one. Mercator Chart Projection

Might even be some code kicking around in the git repo given it’s in the Contributors section.

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Would that still work in JME3?

Not sure. I haven’t looked for or at the code. But at the very least it’d have the mathematics sorted out which for something like map projections is going to be a HUGE part of what you’re trying to do.

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I was looking into this and it appears to be in JME3 docs https://javadoc.jmonkeyengine.org/jme3tools/navigation/MapModel3D.html

Going to try it out here in a bit to see how I can use this.

Good luck!