remaking final rage ...........

the same way you make a cylinder ... its one of the built in patch meshes

(or were you talking about the blue glowy planet lines texture)

Of corse i know how to make a sphere. I was talking about the texturing, or whatever you did there.

well it was just gimp ... ... to make the earth shader I....

• created a new document using the build in "land" script that pretty much takes random cloudy noise and puts a gradiant on diffrent parts depending on brightness
  
• then for the gradiant I picked the thin blue line one
  
• then I made it seamless (using "make seemless" filter)
  
• then I rendered a grid using the "render grid" filter
  
• made it blue
  
• then I merged the line layers
  
• then duplicated that ... and added a "tileable blur" to add a glowyness to it
  
• on a new layer ... using the paintbrush tool I made some red lines (shift click))
  
• and by making some circle selections and using "edit-> stroke selection" I put some small red circles/dots on the map
  
• put lables near the dots for other maps that are on the same planet in the xoniverse (like lightspeed and solarium)
  
• then save as a tga ... and use the same shader file as the glowy things on the bottom of space elevator
  

see ... just gimp ... not that difficult

:: edit ... I forgot ... I also use a layer mask on the entire thing to fade out the top and bottom ... so you cant see the texture messiness that goes on there when you map it to a sphere