What is the best way to unwrap a sphere? After reading How to get perfect UV sphere Mercator projection?
It seems that there is no perfect solution for getting rid of the stretch at the poles of UV spheres.

According to What is the difference between a UV Sphere and an Icosphere?, icospheres can be used for stretch-less UV mapping:


  All faces have the same area, which may be useful for certain types of UV mapping containing non-organic textures. An example that comes to mind is an isocahedral die or billiard balls where stretch must be minimized near the point where the number is printed onto the ball.


Incidentally, a lowish-poly billiard ball is exactly what I'm attempting to create.

However, my attempts at neatly unwrapping an icosphere have mostly failed (smart UV unwrap works perfectly for using baked textures, however I was hoping for something more like the example in the 6th post of this thread, with a nice clean rectangular map).

How can an icosphere (I assumed the term "geosphere" in the thread was referring to a (geodesic) sphere made of triangles, like an icosphere) be cleanly unwrapped? Or if it's not possible, is there another way to do this which I'm missing?



I'm planning on using the resulting sphere in the BGE.
I find the results are best when islands best match the actual shape of the geometry.  The closer you get to this the less stretching you will have.

For a sphere, I find this works best for me.  A cube with sub-D at level 2 which is applied then corrected in Edit mode with the To-Sphere tool. 

Then 

Or even better for less stretching.  (however, more seams mean more chance for the lighting to show artifacts with specular highlights on normal maps).



EDIT:  It just occurred to me that some of the issues which people are having with stretching in their textures may be related to the Sub-Divide UV's  Option in either of the two sub-D modifiers(Multi-res).

If you don't set this button appropriately, then you will likely have stretching and it matter matter how well the UV's are laid out.

As a general guideline, it seems best to disable the Sub-Divide UV's option when your mesh is mathematically evenly spaced.

So when you have built your mesh with somewhat un-evenly spaced lines, then you may want to leave Sub-Divide the UV's on for the least amount of stretching.  

I toggle it on and off rapidly while watching the model and how a checkered texture is become stretched or not.
I do the same thing with the little eyeball icon that turns the modifier on and off.

Keeping an eye on this should help minimize the baking difficulties.