Creating texture maps for spheres from 2d ortho images

[jackpile]

I hope someone can help point me in the right direction here. I’d like to create texture maps for a series of balls using spheres of course so that they are correctly projected onto the sphere. I’d like to create a tennis ball, beach ball, soccer ball, etc. for example from 2d ortho images I have (tennis ball image below) to a Unity sphere. I realize I am probably missing some information on the tennis ball, but hopefully it’s a sufficient approximation. I found a pretty good open source basketball blender file with a basketball texture map (below) that works on a Unity sphere. How can I warp my 2d images properly (and easily!) similarly using Photoshop or other tool to fit this projection? What is this projection? I know it depends on the UV mapping of the sphere, but I don’t even know what that is. I could create a new sphere object say in Blender, but I already know this basketball map works on a Unity sphere. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[system]

If you are planning on going straight into Unity without doing any work in a 3D platform, you would have to find a texture that has been created by someone else. I use 3D Studio Max and Mudbox to do my texturing. My typical workflow for an object such as a sphere is to take the Sphere, Unwrap it in Max (UVW Unwrap) and get a pretty good fit in there. I then export my object template to Photoshop and paint in most of the texture. At that point, the problem that I face is the seams. I correct these in Mudbox with Export Scene to PSD. Another solution, if you are not fully interested in setting up the uvs is to go from 3D straight to mudbox. The Export Scene to PSD will project the texture onto the shape based on the current facing. How it works is you take your object, rotate it in 3D, and then take a 2D snapshot of it. You then paint on that, and put it back into 3D.