Make a Texture wrap an entire sphere?

You need to unwrap the UV’s of your sphere in your modeling software. Search for UV mapping tutorials for whichever program you are using if you dont know how it is done.

I feel like this must be super simple and I’m just missing it, but after searching for a long while Ive decided to ask for help.

What I’m trying to do is so simple, the material editor is taunting me by doing it by default. I’m trying to apply 1 texture to spheres and have this texture wrap around the entire sphere, so as to form a planet. The material editor shows the material preview attached on a sphere, and this actually looks PERFECT for what I want, couldn’t ask for better.

Unfortunately, in reality, when I apply the material to my spheres, it gets applied to 6 faces like a cube. I just want the texture to be used once, not 6 times. How can I do this?

Picture shows the problem on the left, and the desired effect on the right in the preview pane

I was actually creating these spheres in Unreal itself by making a new blueprint-Actor and adding a sphere shape. I assumed this would give me control over what you’re mentioning.

Does Unreal have the ability to do that? I guess I’m better suited just checking out Blender and progressing from there

Edit: So, I made my model in Blender, but when important to UE4 it loads nothing. After researching apparently unreal has trouble loading textures and materials from Blender and you’re just supposed to do it manually in UE4… which puts me right back at square one

It isn’t really square one, when you set your UV coordinates Unreal can see that, all you have to do is manually add the texture to the object which is as simple as dragging and dropping the material you want onto the LOD0 Element which can be found in the static mesh editor window under details.

16413-lod0.png

Alright well I don’t know anything about UV mapping, I guess I figured since it’s rendering the model how I want in Blender it would automatically do that… I still don’t really understand why it can’t automatically do that then since I’m literally looking at it in blender. Or why there’s tons of options to move materials/textures around but not a way to do it like a sphere, like exactly how it’s doing in the preview pane.

I’m really ignorant and dumb so I just don’t understand is all, obviously I have a lot to learn. I’ll start with UV mapping. Thanks for the help

Edit: Okay, I knew something simple was throwing me off. One of the spheres you can select in Unreal has the UV like that. When I made a different type, what I was trying to do now works.