How to create spherical textures? I'm trying to create a texture for a sphere right now. With different Blender tutorials I get a texture on the sphere, but always with distortion at the north and south pole. I use Paint.net to create my textures, but I can't create spherical textures with it. Does anyone have a tool that converts a normal texture into a spherical texture?
Since normal UV mapping creates distortions (from the vertex linear interpolation) the Generated UV coordinates usually gives better result.

Give the texture node the Generated UV coordinates and set the method to project to Sphere. 

Here is a full tutorial: https://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/earth-cycles