Mapping a sphere?

[mmoriarty]

I'm trying to map a globe image of the earth to a sphere with a hole in it. I have tried making the sphere in a couple of different ways but I cannot seem to get the map of the earth to wrap around the sphere. I have been working on this for well over an hour. This is literally a 30 second job in a couple of other 3d programs I use. What am I doing wrong?

I'm using VW 2008

Edited August 12, 2008 by mmoriarty

[M.CH]

Set your class and apply the texture, under the class edit dialogue box.

Final adjustments made in the OIP

[mmoriarty]

I understand that. The problem is the "Final adjustments". I have tried using various mappings ( perimeter, sphere, cylinder, plane. You would think it would be sphere but you would be wrong.) and tried altering my earth image. The original image was a jpg rectangle, 2"w x 1"h. I have tried changing the image to different aspect ratios and altered the size and other parameters in the renderworks texture editor and the OIP. This should be a simple operation. If anyone has done this successfully I would really like to know how. If possible, supply details. Telling me to apply the texture, then adjust in OIP does not help much.

[mmoriarty]

I still cannot find a way to map the earth image onto a sphere. For one thing, the Sphere mapping mode in VW appears to only map half a sphere so its not really spherical mapping. I thought the cylinder mode would work with my rectangular image but I couldn't find any way to control the height of the cylinder without also affecting how it wraps horizontally. This appears to me to be a problem like isometric dimensioning. It should be simple but in VW its a requires a long series of complicated steps. When I have time I guess I'll go back and find out how to map an image on to a hemisphere (which I think might work in VW). If that works I can divide my earth image in 2 and make 2 separate hemispheres and put them together. It just seems way more complex than it needs to be.