Texturing a Sphere

Can anyone point me to a procedure for making a texture fit on a sphere without distorting? I wonder if there's an easy way to add a counter-distortion in Photoshop?

Maybe there's an easier way yet? Any suggestions?

Robin

See if you have the Polar Coordinate filter in photoshop

Interesting question--I say this, because you rarely (if ever) see this question. A sphere usually takes a texture pretty well. There is some squeezing at the poles, but that's always the case. If you texture a sphere with a checker pattern, you will see what I mean. A good example is a flat texture of a globe--if you lay this on a sphere, it will wrap pretty convincingly on a sphere without any tweaking. In SL you may have to rotate the texture, so the poles are at the poles of the sphere. I think the poles of a sphere mesh in SL are at the sides when you create a sphere prim...

If you have a 3d application, you can UV Unwrap a sphere to get the flat layout of the mesh, that way you can texture it in relation to distortion effects at the poles.

Perhaps you can stretch out each pole and experiment with what works best.

Can you post a screenshot of what the texture looks like on a sphere right now...so we can get an idea of how to work around this for you. Thanks.

Thanks for the ideas!

Robin

Actually, if you visit Robin Woods area inworld, she has a UV Map for a sphere ready to go.

A cheap trick I learned was to transform the canvase to a circle insert your image into the circle, (all edges trimmed) and then stretch it back out to normal and upload. works great for making globes.