Using cube mapping to render planets First question on this forum...
I need to take a generated cube map then use it as a base texture onto a sphere in a material. It must have been done a gazillion times in blender but I just can't find the information of how to do it.
I want to use a cube map this way to texture a planet and get rid of the worst distortions around the poles as compared to using a single texture.
So what I want to do is:

Load a cube map texture
Use xyz coordinates as a texture lookup in this cube map to get the base color.

Anyone knows how to do it?
EDIT:
I realized I was a bit unclear above.
Cube mapping is an established tech in computer graphics but requires the &quot;engine&quot; to support it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_mapping
If I only project a cube on the sphere I will have blending artifacts between the 12 seams of the textures which will especially bee noticeable when rotating the object.
Cube Mapping removes these artifacts by assuming the 6 faces are the same texture and kind of samples across the different faces to do i.e. trilinear mipmapping or whatever algorithm one have selected for zooming in.
The downside to this is that you need to use 3d-coordinates (u,v,w) instead of 2d (u,v).
The sign and to the absolute value largest axis decides which face you will pick a sample from and the other two coordinates will denote the uv locally on that face. This has been in hardware for very many years (at least since the beginning of 2000 or so).
I can't find any places where you can upload a &quot;real&quot; cube map texture and use it in a material in blender.
Is this possible?
The comment from lemon is what i thought too. Take a default cube, subdivide it good and well, then &quot;Transform -&gt; to sphere -&gt; 1.0&quot;
The UV map on the cube should still be squarical, and be able to map.
The other way is messing with UV unwrap and trying &quot;cube projection&quot;, but IDK enough about that to help you.