Background: I am attempting to create a Unity application for viewing asteroids. I have a wavefront object that I got from NASA's PDS SBN. Right now, I am looking to replicate the version of Eros from the 3D Asteroid Catalogue (click "Grayscale" on the website to see the texture), but in Unity instead of ThreeJS. I believe I need to create a UV map in Blender so that I can apply it to the object in Unity.
Thanks to lemon in a previous post, I was able to get a cylindrical texture map on the asteroid. But I did not realize that I couldn't import this directly into Unity.
For reference, the wavefront file I'm using is located here, and the simple cylindrical projection I'm using is located here (warning, large image file).
Question: I have a wavefront object and a texture which is an equirectangular projection. I want to apply this equirectangular projection too the object in Unity.
I believe that I need to do this by getting a UV for the texture. To create a UV, I want to unwrap the object's mesh in a way that is identical to an equirectangular projection. What is the best way to do this?
Attempted Solutions: Here is an image of the working equirectangular projection in Blender:
That works well, but this does not import to Unity. So I attempted to create a UV map that emulates the equirectangular projection. I unwrapped the mesh as a cylinder and applied it to the asteroid with an image texture node. Here is what the unwrapped mesh looks like:
I'm not sure if this is the right unwrapping or not, because when I try to display the asteroid, I get something very garbled. Here is a picture of my attempt at rendering the asteroid with its texture on:
I'm confident that I am applying this completely wrong, I'm just not sure why. Here is what my unwrapped mesh looks like -- the entire asteroid is covered, so the streaks & the weird band around the asteroid don't make