Sphere-mapped SkyBox texturing problems

Hi, I currently have a problem with the way a sphere-map texture maps to the spherical sky box.

(the one with the “true” at the end of the line, instead of “false” for a cube).



I am trying to setup a representation of the Milky Way, using a Milky Way wrappable texture for a sphere.



The code I used was directly taken from the Skybox tutorial and modified slightly as shown:

[java]rootNode.attachChild(SkyFactory.createSky(assetManager, “Textures/Texture.jpg”, true));[/java]



The texture seems to duplicate on the sphere and one of the duplications is bunched up at one end.



I wondered if the sphere had it’s poles lying horizontally instead of vertically. I could not find a method to re-orient the sphere in 3D space. But this would not explain the duplication.



I tried the skybox with a wrappable EARTH texture, because the result would be easy to judge, being easy to see where things are going wrong.



Here is a link to one of the textures I tried, after converting it from BMP to JPG.

http://svn.assembla.com/svn/LaspView/src/TestRenderer/OpenGL/EarthTexture.bmp



Other textures tried were:

Earth texture 1024 x 512 pixels

Star field representing the Milky Way at 1024 x 2048 pixels



All of them had the mapping problems.



I saw a reference to the StPeters.jpg on one forum post, but I could not locate this JPG file to see what it looks like (flat on the screen) to see if I am using the wrong kind of wrapped texture.



I am using the nightly updated version of jME and jMP.



Looking forward to comments and/or a solution. Thanks.

Nearly every texture you will try to wrap into a sphere will have distortion in the poles. There’s no solution to this issue besides using a cubemap instead of a 2D texture