Drawing texture on a 3d sphere[lwjgl 3]

Hello, Im trying to draw a texture(earth, sun, doesn’t really matter) on a 3d sphere, and I just can’t really figure how to do it, whenever I try to do it I get the following result:

Imgur

Imgur

I’ll post some code that explains a bit what I do:

This is my drawSphere method:

	public void drawSphere(float radius) {
		final float PI = 3.141592f;
		float x, y, z, alpha, beta; // Storage for coordinates and angles
		int gradation = 20;
		for (alpha = 0.0f; alpha < Math.PI; alpha += PI / gradation) {
			for (beta = 0.0f; beta < 2.01 * Math.PI; beta += PI / gradation) {
				x = (float) (radius * Math.cos(beta) * Math.sin(alpha));
				y = (float) (radius * Math.sin(beta) * Math.sin(alpha));
				z = (float) (radius * Math.cos(alpha));
				glVertex3f(x, y, z);
				x = (float) (radius * Math.cos(beta) * Math.sin(alpha + PI / gradation));
				y = (float) (radius * Math.sin(beta) * Math.sin(alpha + PI / gradation));
				z = (float) (radius * Math.cos(alpha + PI / gradation));
				glTexCoord2f(x, y);
				glVertex3f(x, y, z);
			}
			glEnd();
		}
	}

This is my rendering method from my “Star” class:

	public void render() {
		rotation += rotationSpeed;
		glPushMatrix();
		glRotatef(90, 1, 0, 0);
		 glRotatef(5, 0, 1, 0);
		glRotatef(rotation, 0, 0, rotation);
		glTranslatef(distance, distance, 0);
		if (translate) {
			glTranslatef(x, y, z);
		}
		glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D);
		drawSphere(radius);
		glPopMatrix();
	}

“glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D);” is the method that shows the actual texture, and I tried other things like earth.bind, glTexCoord2f, and things like that, but nothing actually worked. How do I map the texture on the sphere? Im using lwjgl 3, so using all the glu options are not really available for me, I’ve heard its bad using those old methods, tho I can’t really understand why, but Im trying to stick with lwjgl 3.
I tried to not add too much irrelevant code so it will be easier, if more code is needed let me know. Thanks.

First, you need a suitable projection of a spherical surface onto a 2D surface. Most people and also most textures you find use equirectangular projection. So there is that.

Next you need to know that texture coordinates in OpenGL are in the range ([0…1], [0…1]). So you need to map the texture coordinates in the range from zero to one in both dimensions u and v (also called ‘s’ and ‘t’) onto the sphere.

Equirectangular projection is suitable for you since it can simply use longitude/latitude angles, just like you are currently using to generate the 3D vertex positions in cartesian space.

So, try the following directly before the first glVertex3f call:


glTexCoord2f(beta / (2.0f * PI), alpha / PI);

And the following directly before the second glVertex3f call:


glTexCoord2f(beta / (2.0f * PI) + 0.5f / gradation, alpha / PI + 1.0f / gradation);

You already answered me in the lwjgl forum, so there’s no point answering here as well, thanks anyway :slight_smile: