"I do additional "knifing" at the VERY top of the hemishere, ie zoom as close as I can get to the top point and divide the polygons just nanometers below it;"
Um... wouldn't that just result in a bunch of degenerate triangles, which are really really thin? If you take a quad, divide it along it's diagonal, and then squeeze the top two points together, one of the triangles becomes really thin. I fail to see how this improves the mapping.
Um... wouldn't that just result in a bunch of degenerate triangles, which are really really thin? If you take a quad, divide it along it's diagonal, and then squeeze the top two points together, one of the triangles becomes really thin. I fail to see how this improves the mapping.