Hey, I thought I'd solved my problem with images distorting in spherical mapping, by...what? Reading the manual. But, no....
Apparently, creating a 'purely implicit' texture projection is supposed to solve this issue of image distortion at the poles. They even have pictures proving it. However, I can't get any image to map to a sphere using this texture projection method. I also found, in the manual, that one is supposed to use an 'image implicit' node to map the image (they don't tell you that initially, you have to accidentally find it...). However, that doesn't work either. All I get is the dreaded generic color one gets when ones texture projection is not in the same universe, if you know what I mean. Having followed the manual's instructions, what am I missing here? Thanks for any, Nancy