Creating planet surface and sphere graphics

[soundprostudios]

I'm guessing many people here are familiar with Andrew Kramers videocopilot site. I'm also guessing that people are familiar with his planet tutorials be it earth, dead planet, exploding planet etc....

The results look great but it creates a big question for me....he includes project files for the earth surface and cloud layers as a 2D flat jpeg image. You cannot use these graphics in stock footage so I want to create my own hand drawn images to wrap to spheres.

So, I do things like take a photo of a texture, and in Photoshop Extended CS4 work the image over as a flat 2D image until I like the look. You can probably guess what my problem will be....to simply use that image in AE effected by CCsphere there are obvious seams and warping of the image at the poles...I expected that. So I then tried to work on the image, and then create a 3D sphere in photoshop and continue cloneing out the seam and making the poles work out right. Works great and can be placed into After Effects...but...it creates it's own camera and light system which will dictate a different workflow than I am hoping to achieve. It works..but I really want to obtain a 2D final image for use in AE. Finally photoshop does not seem to be able to 'unwrap' the sphere back to a rectangular 2D image to allow for CCsphere to do the work of 3D shaping.

From some research I am starting to think that it will take true 3D software like 3Dstudio Max, or others to do this unwrapping back to 2D.

So my question boils down to...can I do the 2D to 3D back to 2D work within Photoshop Extended CS4 or the combined tools in the Production Suite? Is there a flaw to my workflow method (some sort of edge blending mode in Photoshop that I'm not aware of for instance?)

All the best,
James Hooey

Sorry in advance for the long post, but I like to hear myself type.... not really.

[soundprostudios]

Having played with Photoshop CS4 extended now for a couple more days...and most importantly reading the manual... Photoshop can most certainly do the 2D to 3D wrap, clone out seams, fix poles and dothe final missing link (and my original question).....tah dah!!...map the sphere texture back to a 2D rectangular image to use in AE or even other 3D apps......

Actually, after spending some time with it, I am finding that PSE while not a full 3D app like 3DStudio Max or Cinema 4D, is actually very robust in it's current form, considering it's photo editing roots. I am able to create many 3D primatives or even more interestingly import .kmz, collada or other files for 3D shapes and manipulate, apply up to 9 textures per shape, and keyframe animate camera, lighting and object position and render out these 3D files as complete .avi or .mov renders for use in After Effects comps.

I thought I was going to be getting into Blender to achieve some of what I can already do in the much more familar Photoshop interface....it's a pretty neat convergence of workflow and technology....yay!!!