It's alive, it's alive!!!
Once I got over the problem of getting the properly uv-mapped icosahedron model to render in povray, it was smooth sailing.
Since the image was basically mapped from inside the center of the sphere, it did come out in mirror image. Simply selected the entire image in my favorite raster image editor and flipped it vertically.
The uv-image I was using was pretty low-res, so there was some stretching of pixels near the poles. Ugly, but since the purpose is really to make the geometry available, I'm not too sensitive to the aesthetics of the image.
I'll get into details later, but it's getting a bit late.
In brief:
I used the icosahedral pov file exported from Wings3D with some small modifications to make it... work. First off, at least in my instantiation of MagaPOV, rad_def.inc kills the script, so that gets commented out. The entire global settings block, for some reason I haven't figured out, results in a black screen, so that goes bye-bye. I removed the light_source, but in retrospect that makes no difference for good or ill...
Most importantly, I moved the camera to <0,0,0>, changed it from perspective to spherical and commented out everything between location and look_at. I changed look_at to <0,0,1)> I also changed the ambient rgb in finish to <1,1,1> 'cause it was a bit dark.
After arriving at this combination through trial, error and foul language, I had that nice mirror image map of Regina. Cool!
I now had something very useful. I could port this into gplates and digitize the continental coastlines to some appropriate accuracy or I could load it into G.Projector or Flex Projector and convert it into all manner of convenient projections. I'm so happy. To celebrate, here's a screenshot of Regina in gplates, ready for digitizing, a Robison projection of Regina, made with g.projector, and a compressed copy of my final successful pov-file... I'm going to try this again with a different map as a test, but I'm highly confident.
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