Mapping a sphere

Spheres are perhaps one of the most hardest things to map textures properly. I go through a few steps using a Spherize filter that helps make a two dimentional texture bulge vertically and then resizing a few times. That's the simple part. The hard part is compensating for how the texture actually maps to a sphere. In the virtual world, the top and bottom of the sphere reveals the most problems. Parts of the texture seem to be missing chunks. Where the actual texture has nice lines that line up every where, the end result is lines that are jagged and don't fit. I wonder if there is something that can help me make textures map to my preference. Maybe a sculpty would be more beneficial. From Dedric Mauriac via bloghud.com