Texturing the interior of a dome

I am struggling to create an acceptable texture for the interior of domes on Baroque buildings and cathedrals. The textures I have been trying are 'straight' photos of the inside of RL domes. There is a lot of distortion, and applying 'planar' turns into a lot of zigzags. I have hollowed a large hemisphere for this purpose. So far, adjusting the texturing proportions has been unsatisfactory. Joining two quarter spheres shows a slight improvement.

I did see a beautifully made dome in which the image was (almost) perfect, but it used 72 prims (!!!!). This was concentric rings of small flat sections.

I am wondering whether a handdrawn grid of some sort might be a better solution, but other than staring at Mercator's projection of the globe, I cannot yet see how to do this.

Any advice is welcomed.

Best wishes from Ainee Kohime

You need to perform a spherical mapping of a panoramic image. Google for "panorama" and "spherical projection".

eg: http://www.panoguide.com/howto/panoramas/spherical.jsp#

wowowowow

Thank you! Oh, this is a whole new zone of texturing for me... I was boggled by the mathematics and the websites in Czech, but I do understand a little bit better now...

So then I tried inworld placing of a texture of a geometric grid inside the two joined quarter hemispheres and I am very pleased with the result...

I can just about see how I will make a texture of the interior of the Pantheon roof...

I do like to learn new skills!

Best wishes from Ainee

PS: If you go to my shop in SL and use the teleport to my skybox demo you'll see an example of a spherical panorama in SL.