straight lines on a sphere

OK back story. after reading Porky Gorky year in review thread over in RA. i went to build a door using a flattened sphere,yes i want a sphere here not a cylinder i like the edges and like everything in SL what appears to be a simple idea has a catch that takes some tinkering

OK the question, what are the tips or tricks to get the vertical lines to run up and down so it does not have that basketball look to it. i use Photo-shop 7.0

Place a grid template on it and take a snap shot, reverse the curve of each line in PS and they may be straight when reapplied?

That's going to be VERY difficult ... perhaps impossible. A sphere has a north and a south pole where longitude lines all converge. You can do a lot of fiddling with your texture in Photoshop, but in the end it's spherical geometry that will do you in. The lines have to converge. The normal answer to "undistorting" a texture is to make a grid template, slap it on the object, take a bunch of photos, and then stretch them in Photoshop to make a new "undistorted" texture. I doubt that you'll have any success in this case, because the high-latitude lines STILL have to converge at the poles. The best you will be able to do with that approach is to get nearly vertical lines until you get to about 60 degrees north of the equator. (If this explanation doesn't make sense, try staring at a Mercator map projection and a globe for a while.)

Have you thought of using a flattened torus instead of a sphere? I can't visualize your door from the description, but if you are just looking for a shape with rounded edges and aren't stuck on making the door spherical, a torus might do the job. Latitude and longitude lines will at least be at right angles.

If you squash the Z axis, then Filter > Distort > Polar Coords is your friend.

http://www.vgd.co.uk/pages/notebook/mapsphere.html

Not sure about any solutions for squishing X or Y, but it might get me thinking.

Well, that was fast. Figured it out using Spherize and Polar Coords already. Well, for squishing X or Y.

Start your document and do a bunch of verical lines.

Filter > Distort > Spherize : Amount = -100%

Filter > Distort > Polar Coords : Polar to Rectangular

Now, assuming that you have this on it's own layer, you will have to Free Transform it to the upper half of your working document. Copy it and use Free Transform again to mirror it to the bottom half of your working doc.

You should end up with two box-ish shapes on the left and right with some circle-ish shapes that are concentric to 25% and 75% positions. Um, yeah.

Save, apply, and squish.

Now, if you want to do a specific texture, you will have to do some extra acrobatics.

Try using a flattened torus instead?