Getting rid of the 'pinched' poles in Spherical mapping

[giorgio-renna]

So I've been reading a lot about this topic on different websites, but have yet to find an answer that will give me a satisfactory result. I am trying to apply a 2d texture made in photoshop onto a polygon sphere using spherical mapping. However, as most of you probably know, this results in a tremendous distortion at the poles. I heard that using spherical projection would help rid of that effect, but alas, it made no difference and I got the exact same result.

Also, as an added bit of information, my sphere is actually composed of several different objects (so the sphere itself is not one obejct). I'm not sure to what extent this would influence the mapping or projection. Although it looked pretty decent despite the aforementioned poles. Any advice in the matter is appreciated.

[joojaa]

You can not get rid of the pinch, a texture on sphere will pinch somewhere period.

What you do instead is draw the picture as if looking form the pole and compensate for the pinch. This is what happens with a square map of earth its wrapped up to a square. Theres no perfect way of doing it (theres just several ways to counteract it locally) so that means countries near the pole appear bigger than they do in reality.

So what you do is you paint things bigger near the top and bottom, or project the image in 3 pieces then itegrate thet back tyo texture for fixing. Its not exactly getting rid of the pich but it doesn't matter.

[giorgio-renna]

Thanks Jooja, very insightful. I will play around with my original texture and try deforming it at the poles.

[giorgio-renna]

For the Maya users who are at my same level, I want to post up some pictures to show how I got around this problem. For starters, know that I was making a very simple toony moon. The colored circles in the image are craters. I made them different colors so I could keep track of where each circle was from my original photoshop drawing.

[giorgio-renna]

Now, following Joojaa's advice, I tried to counter the deformation by deforming the circles in the original photoshop file into ovals.

[giorgio-renna]

The yellow and red extremities of the photoshop drawing indicate the poles. In that area, to avoid deformation, the ovals were angled horizontally, whereas in the center, the ovals were angled vertically.

Here's a picture of the moon with this new deformed drawing applied to it.
I had to play a little around with Spherical mapping also to get to this point. What I think I did is change the UV coordinates (not sure if it's the right term) to 360 and 180.

If anybody knows a faster way to go about this process for the sake of other newbies having this problem, post your solution.