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Does anyone know a good method for this? Specifically getting a spherical texture to wrap properly around a sphere?

The method I'm using right now is to create the bump map in photoshop, then use polar coordinates filter to stretch right, then take the resulting image and feed it into one hemisphere of the sphere, and duplicate that and flip it around for the other half. This gets me pretty far, but I still get seams and some mismatches.

Thanks for any help!

Honestly, I would model what you need. Use a cloner to roughly place your dimples, build out connecting edges, etc.

There are some tutorials on Vimeo and YT how to model a golf ball in C4D.

If you insist on using a texture you could model the ball and color the dimples in black, then simply bake the texture and use it on a clean sphere.

Here is one:

http://www.edharriss.com/golfball.jpg

Thanks!

I'm kind of a golf fanatic, so I was looking for the dimples to be in the hexagonal pattern.

Hi, you got a minute? Try this.

1. Make a sphere - icosahedron - 36 seg.
2. Hit C , select all edges
3. Smooth Subdivide ( U-Shift-S ) , Disolve
4. Select all polygons , extrude inner twice and scale down to taste ( preserve groups off )
5. Render in Octane ( very important step )
Regards
Milan

I may never make a golf ball but that tip is so elegant that I must speak out.

That is really freakin' good! Thanks a ton! I was kind of looking to do the dimples in a bump map though to keep the poly count down because I was going to do a ton of these balls in the scene. But I will definitely use this for the up close stuff. Thanks again!

Well, at this point you can use proximal in luminance or dirt in Octane to bake a height map. Just give it spherical UVs. So to answer your texture related question, you model and bake. Ideally it would be a tangent normal map and you would do it in ZBrush, 3Dcoat, C4D sculpting tools etc.

Also lookup using Render Instance object as a proxy switch. You could use lowpoly obj. for viewport and switch to highpoly for rendering. Dynamics would use a sphere collision shape so no worries there ( Not sure but I think you could even use nulls instead of spheres to speedup baking ). As for Octane it could handle millions of instances even if each one is million polys.
Regards
Milan

Great technique, milanm!