title: Textured spheres without strong distortion
body: <p>I've seen well-textured balls, planets, and other spherical objects in couple of games, last time in UFO: aftermath. If you just splatter a texture into latitude/longditude as u and w -coordinates you'll get lots of ugly texture distortion to poles.</p>
  
  <p>I can think myself an one way to implement a spherical map with minimum distortion. By mapping in triangles instead of squares. But I don't know any algorithms. How to produce vertices and texture coordinates for such spheres?</p>
  
  <p>Also, I don't see a way to generate a complete spherical map from a simple flat square map. Is there some intuitive way on drawing such maps without real trouble?</p>
  
  <p>Though, is there other algorithms to render a sphere without or with minimal distortion?</p>
  
  <p>Both raytracing and rasterising algorithms are interesting.</p>