After generating a spherical distorted map (or just polar distorted) in Photoshop and creating planar mapped mesh in max, when I match up the parts together, I get a cracking sky right at the top..
I assume the texture is good enough, you can find the tutorial from the web, so the problem lies in probably in the u,v of the mesh. Since we are no artists, I don't want to always bake the u,v out of the dcc, I wish I could make 2 functions which create the standard planar mapping u,v and spherical mapping u,v on the fly, right built into my application. More then often, the standard ones are good enough. But How do I find the math?

So this picture exhibits the cracking situation:

Having a divine spike, when

for (int i = 0; i < numVerts; i++)
        {
            D3DXVECTOR3 v;
            v = pVerts.pos - vCent;
            D3DXVec3Normalize(&v, &v);
            pVerts.norm = v;
            pVerts.tu = 0.5 + (atan2(v.z, v.x) / (2*D3DX_PI));
            pVerts.tv = 0.5 - (asin(v.y) / D3DX_PI);
              
        }