Tom Beddard is providing a downloadable pixel bender plug-in for creating little planets that will work in After Effects, Photoshop, Or the Pixel Bender Toolkit. Check out this page for the download, and how to use it!
“To generate these images we start with a spherical (equirectangular) panorama. This is an image where the x-axis corresponds to the longitude around a sphere (0-360 degrees) and the y-axis is the latitude (-90 to 90 degrees). For any longitude or latitude position on a sphere we can retrieve the colour directly from the corresponding x,y coordinates on the panorama image. A proper equirectangular panorama should be twice as wide as tall, e.g. 1024×512 pixels.
Creating equirectangular panoramas is quite an art. If you want to create your own a few tutorialshave been written on the subject. Luckily there is a huge selection of creative-commons licensed panoramason Flickr we can start playing with.”
