How to make (or where to get) a half-sphere mesh that textures properly?

Question

I'm making a game in Unity that involves lots of spheres. Said spheres will have lighting applied to them, but will also be viewed from only one camera angle. Right now, the full spheres look something like this when textured, normal-mapped, and lit:

This is correct. The spheres in my game will only be seen head-on, thus I only need to render their top halves.

However, if I use the same material on only half a sphere (with a lower resolution, mind you), I get something like this:

(It's not the exact same material, but it's close enough, and shows the same problem.)

This is incorrect. The weird part is I only encounter this issue in compiled builds of the game; in the editor, the hemisphere is textured exactly as I expect.

At the request of a commentator, here is one of the textures I'm using:

I'm also using it as a normal map.

My question is thus: how can I make (or where can I find) a hemisphere that can be properly textured, and why does my current hemisphere mesh only render properly in the Unity editor?

Answer 1

You shouldn't really worry about cutting of the other half of the sphere since Unity doesn't render faces that are looking away anyway. That doesn't solve your problem however. Try to save your sphere as a .blend file. Or if you did that, export it as an .fbx.

If you really want to save resources you should bake(bake texture) your full sphere unto a halfsphere that has had "project from view" unwrap applied. Then you also save texture memory where the biggest performance hit comes from. Forget about saving polygons. Generally they don't matter.

EDIT: I think I figured it out. You used the default Unity Spheres first. But exported the halfspheres from Blender. If that is the case. Then add a fresh "UV Sphere" in blender. Press U and click Sphere projection. Then cut half the faces off. Or better yet, follow my baking advice.