Somebody sparked my interest a few posts back about reflections, and this is the barrier I ran into! I think it's pretty basic, but perhaps someone could tell me what I'm doing wrong? Note the seam in the sphere's texture. It's the same all the way around, although I'm using a seamless reflection map. This map was generated by the sky in the following image, where I actually reflected the sky instead of using the "Reflection Map" settings inside the Materials Lab... Am I making any sense? Can anyone help with this problem?

... and this is the same scene, only rendered with "real" reflections instead of using "Reflection Map". Note that the larger sphere is the same in both, a mirror for contrast...

Was the map you are using an actual 360 degree render, or just what could be about 30-45 degrees of sky in a normal render? An actual 360 render should be seamless, this looks to have a seam, so it may be doubtful that it is a full 360.

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Aye, i hear ya. It was indeed a 360-degree render, using panorama options. I tried it with both QTVR settings and the stock Bryce panorama settings...

Seamless texture maps are only seamless left to right, up to down. You couldn't say take the left edge of a texture and match it up to the top or bottom, only to the right hand side. Meaning, the seam you see in your top pic is say for example...a left edge meeting a top edge. They don't match, and this problem is very apparent on spheres (obviously). Try wrapping the reflection map differently onto the sphere. AgentSmith

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Good call, Agentsmith! It worked, I'll post it IF it finishes rendering! I merely had to track down a four-way filter for Photoshop and tweak the original "sky" map...

Did you find a four way filter? I have made a couple TOTALLY seamless maps(top,bottom,left,right), but I had to do it by hand in Photoshop.

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agentsmith: was that by using the clone stamp tool??

Somewhat. I would just select a small portion of say, the left side, and then with copy/paste replicate it for the other three sides, this would make it so all outer edges had the same edge. Then I would use the Clone tool and/or the Heal tool to blend in the inner edges. Of course before you do all that, you have to make it a normal seamless by using the offset filter (again, along with Clone and Heal). AgentSmith

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hmm....perhaps I will have to experiement....thanks!

Aye, I've used Painter 3D to do it by hand before, and that worked awesome since it's made to do just that, but the filter I was using at work was a free one from some site, let me locate it and post the link. It was a little different than TRU seamlessness, it would just alow you to blend the image into a good approximation. But I'll post the link when I find it....

Anything close is better than having to do it ALL by hand, lol.

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Yeeaaayyy! I found the link for the filter I was talking about, it's Flaming Pear's "Tesselation" filter. Check it out, they actually have some of the very best filters I've ever seen! Put it on your action-item-list...! This filter is just a 15-day free trial, but it's so potent and powerful for our purposes, everyone should give it a whirl! I think I'm gonna try Melancholytron next...

Ah, yes Flaming Pear, awesome plugins. Unfortunately Tesselation will only make traditional seamless tiles, which is great but I can make those no problem on my own. I was looking for an easier way to make ANY edge tile to ANY edge on a texture. Traditional seamless tiles will only make it so the right edge tiles with the left edge, and the top edge tiles with the bottom edge. You can't take the top edge and match it up to the left or right edge, which is what can happen when a texture is wrapped to a sphere. Check out Flaming Pears "Lunar Cell" plugin, it basically creates planets with ridiculously amazing results, no kidding, it's very close to looking like it came out of 3D. And, most of Flaming Pear's plugins are just $20, some are put into a pack of three for $40. AS

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Aye, you're always one-upping me, AgentSmith! But at least somebody is, it keeps my ego down to manageable levels...! Spherical mapping? Perhaps as alien and far-off as spherical height-mapping...?