Here is a nice little freebie program that I just found and thought I'd share. It's called "Hot Spot Studio", it's actually pretty simple to use and you can get it here http://www.rlvision.com/. I just wish you could save your settings.
Here is one of my images from it:
Then I pulled it up in Gimp, ran GMIC filter on it a couple of times, and tehndid a map to sphere on a squared duplicate of the image, which I put back on it.

That does look cool PM. About to check it out. Thanks for the link.

really cool pic!