Texturing a sphere with a tiled texture I want to create a wrecking ball in Blender. As a first try I created a sphere, UV unwrapped that sphere with Sphere Projection and then tried to texture that sphere with a tiled texture. This is the material setup:



This is the texture I downloaded from textures.com



And this is the rendered image:



I tried scaling this image texture but this did not work I think. How can you texture a sphere with a tiled texture ? Perhaps this is easy with procedural textures but that is a skill I don't have at this moment. How to do it with an image texture or is it just not possible ?

P.S If I am taking the complete wrong direction by trying to texture this sphere with a tiled texture, please tell me. In the end I just want to texture this sphere in a way that it looks like a rusty wrecking ball



P.S I thought I had a tileable texture. But this not being the case this is not a good question. Sorry
Your texture is  not tileable, that's why it doesn't scale well: to make it tileable you can import it in Photoshop or Gimp, apply the "offset" filter at half the resolution of both X and Y dimension (1120 x 787 in your case), and use the stamp and/or the healing tool to eliminate the seams crossing. Pay attention not to touch the border of the image, or you will have to redo the operation.
When the texture is seamless you can generate the relative normal map (i.e. with the Nvidia free plugin for Photoshop, or free online sites), or use a black/white version to control a "bump" node.

In addition I suggest you, instead of fixing the ratio between Diffuse and Glossy (0.1) to plug a "Layer Weight" node (Fresnel output) and control the amount of glossiness with his control: this adds some Fresnel effect, more glossiness at the outer border of the sphere (relatively to the point of view), which helps beliavability of every material.