Simple, but... impossible?

[Benvan]

I have created this VERY simple scene with 3 balls in it, as you can see (hopefully) from the attachement [Ok no, ive just tried and it dont work - here is a link http://www.geocities.com/bve87/cricketballs.png ] . You can also see the "panels" on the spheres. Well i dont want just one panel on a single sphere, i want 3. The problem is, because the spheres are polygon spheres, the map i used to create the black line is just a simple straight line - the UV's do all the rest for me (because of the way the polygons are arranged in the sphere). How on earth can i duplicate that "effect" to different points on the sphere and keep the circular shape (i.e. not have it distort)? I dont want to have to draw obscure circles on my texture map cos it will take absoloutely ages to work out how to have it display properly on the balls. Just to clarify my point - the map that i have put on the spheres is actually made up of a very thin line and very shallow ovals - because the polygons are changing size as you get to the "pinnacle" of the sphere, the line and dots are stretched out to proper size.

Thanks a lot in advance!!
Ben

[Sen3D]

Ok, I think I get what you're doing. Your best bet would be to unwrap the sphere's UV's & paint them on manually.
Failing that, you could try adjusting the tiling, but that would get you 2 or multiples of two I think.
You could select the areas you want to have the decal on & add them using either mix, mask or blend maps or else different material ID's & a multi/subobject map.
There are a few other ways too, but these are the ones I'd try first.

[PerCevan]

I understand your problem, When I first read it I thought it was the easiest thing in the world to fix. But If you do the circles in the center line of yor UV map they wont get distorted.
I tried an fast render on this to see if it worked. Iäm not sure you get exactly what you wanted. but here is an idea anyways

[PerCevan]

here is the uv

[Benvan]

Thanks a lot - there is still a problem though. The circles must be at very exact positions on the sphere. There are 4 in total, so the resulting "shape" is tetrahedral (think back to your high school chemistry and molecular angles). I cant paint this on to a UV because ... er. I dont know tbh. I had one generated and it makes everything look distorted. Is it possible to do it with layered projections? The problem i have had with projections is that it sticks a projection on BOTH sides of the sphere (when using a planar projection - i had thought of trying lots of cylindrical or spherical or so, but i just destroyed my graphics card by accident so i have no computer...

Thanks again!
Ben

[Nothingman]

this is good,
any idea where i can get some tutorials to learn this kind of thing
ive never done uv mapping and would love to learn