Creating a texture for a sphere

[seanr]

I'm trying to make a texture for my pool balls. The problem that I'm running into is that the stripe gets completely distorted. Here's the texture, to be placed with the U reps set to 2:

http://www.mania-online.com/truespace/gallery/seanr/temp/ball-11.jpg

And here's the result:

http://www.mania-online.com/truespace/gallery/seanr/temp/ball-11ss.jpg

WTF do I have to do to make this damn thing map right without being distorted? I've tried searching the web for two hours for tutorials about distortion in spherical projection and have found absolutely nothing. Search engines SUCK!!!!

[seanr]

I should be more specific: how do I need to make the texture for it to map right?

[Katana]

Umm ... don't take this as sounding overly simplified, but would not making the white part around the number a regular circle as opposed to the rounded square you have now solve the problem ?

[seanr]

Cripes, you're only the fiftieth person to ask that. That was the first thing I tried, and it looked worse than this does. Isn't there any informationa vailable anywhere about how to deal with the distortion caused by spherical mapping???????

[seanr]

OK, I turned the UV projection 90 degrees so that the number would wind up on the poles of the sphere, and then I painted the stripe on manually instead of including it in the texture. Here's the result:

http://www.mania-online.com/truespace/gallery/seanr/temp/balls.jpg

[seanr]

For curious trueSpace 4.3 users:

http://www.mania-online.com/truespace/objects/balls_racked.zip

http://www.mania-online.com/truespace/textures/balls.zip

Requires Yamaneko Noise.

[Zznop]

well, that's a great idea.