I need a simple disco ball for my scene, nothing fancy; just a ball with flat surfaces on. I figured I could just get an unsmoothed sphere and use a simple texture to fake a gradient on the faces. I’m rendering in Blender game, and using a texture seemed the simplest solution (just fiddling with the material didn’t quite cut it, it just looked plasticy).
So my question is, how do I get the texture image to repeat itself on every frame of the object?
you can do it by setting map input to ‘UV’, but I wouldn’t recommend using a UV sphere, because the mirrors on a disco ball are all about the same size, and the faces on a UV sphere are not.
Appologies for not replying earlier, hope you don’t think I was ungrateful! Christmas got a jump on me and things were put on hold:P Anyway, the solution does seem to be UV mapping, but I can’t get it to work. When I set the texture to UV, the sphere just becomes gray (the texture is a gradient from black to gray). There should be some black somewhere on the model but there isn’t, no gradient either. I tried using a different image as the texture, and the same thing happened - a single color from the image covers the whole model. No idea what that’s about, can you help me? 
if you want a sphere wih almost square faces like disco ball
2 ways
1 - add a cube and add some subsurf then apply it !
2 - here is a script to do a polyshpere
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=205444
happy 2.5
Thanks for the link! Anyone know about the UV mapping problem?
you could try adding a particule system with a plane object with UV map added on each center face of the shpere
salutations
Thanks for the suggestions everyone! I ended up doing something completely different from what I originally intended, as per usual:P
Did you unwrap & setup all the UV faces in the exact same spot? I’ve done that before (not on a disco ball) with great success.