This is an example. I made it in 2 minutes.

1. Find black and white image with good contrast. (google is good for this.)

2. Open in Photoshop

3. Run gaussian blur (1-2 pixels)

4. Make a circular selection

5. Run Spherize a couple of times

6. Gaussian blur again, 1 pixel or so

That's it. In Bryce or Vue you can reflect the image against a sphere to wrap it around the sphere, as it were. That's what I did as an experiment. But the Photoshop method works just as well.