Distorting an image to map to a sphere

Support Materials and Textures
1

Not sure if this is in the right place…

I have an image texture and I want to distort it so that it maps correctly to a sphere in Blender. How can I do this ? I’ve searched and searched and found nothing. I think there’s some GIMP plugin or something that does this, but I can’t find it.

Thanks,
Rhysy

2

I seem to recall there being something like that too - this might be it or it can help you along the way.

http://www.home.unix-ag.org/simon/gimp/globes.html

3

Thanks for the quick response, but that’s not quite what I’m after. What I want to do is compensate for the distortion you get when the texture is mapped to a sphere, so that when I render the texture in Blender it looks correct. For example with the Earth map in that link, Greenland looks the right size when viewed on a sphere, but in the texture itself it looks squashed. I have a texture that doesn’t look squashed, so I want to create the correct squashing so that it will render without disortion when mapped to a sphere. I probably haven’t phrased that very well…