making planets for space game

[IndieGameCove]

Hi,
I’m trying to make planets for a space game. The problem I’m having is that there is a distortion at the top and bottom of the sphere mesh and I’m trying to figure out the best(easiest/fastest) way to deal with it.

For some of the planets I can just put a solid white color over the poles and call it a frozen arctic area, but I’d like to have lots of different kinds of planets so mitigating that distortion is necessary.

I was wondering if there was a way to take a texture and stretch it to fit better like in this After Effects video: Seamless CC Sphere Textures TUTORIAL | Adobe After Effects - YouTube

Then I could just bake the result into a render target. That would be nice since I could make textures normally and just convert them.

notes:
It’s a vr game so forward rendering.
the player doesn’t land on the planets, they are basically balls that the player can grab.

Thanks!

[Everynone]

This is not a direct answer to your question, an alternative I guess.
Plug these in and see if you like the end result, do note how stretched the caps are.

These are 1/4 of the size I’m using (AH upload size limitations) and the results are pretty decent. I used a piece of software called GrandDesiger (Steam), well worth its price.

Apart from that, not sure how to convert normal images to avoid stretching. Pretty sure it’s possible, though.

edit: perhaps you could replicate the method mentioned in the video in Photoshop and do a batch macro.

[IndieGameCove]

Seems to look about the same with the stretched images. I think it’s just that the uvs for the sphere use tri’s to close the cap so I may need figure out a different uv map setup.
The grand designer program looks pretty useful. thanks.