For the computer game I am developing, I would like to draw very large (~ 500 px) plots of slowly rotating planets. These graphs are meant to impress. What is the best way to do this?
- I could pre-process each frame, but at 500px and a rotation period of 10 seconds, which is a ridiculous amount of data per planet.
- I could use a 3D engine and map the texture of the planet onto a grid approaching a sphere, but at 500 pixels, I am afraid that the number of polygons should be huge so that it looks good.
- I could write a kind of custom 3D engine that does nothing but effectively render the textured sphere by converting the x / y coordinate of each pixel in the view into the coordinate space of the sphere texture - but this is connected and cannot benefit from graphics acceleration .
- Anything else I didn’t think about?
Here is an example of an animated GIF of what I mean. (With 100x100 px and 60 frames, this is already quite huge, sorry.) Imagine that it is much, much larger, rotates much slower and animates more smoothly:
But if it was 500x500 px and 10 x 25 = 250 frames, we will talk about hundreds of MB of data, so this simple approach does not work.
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