Built-in 'Planetary mapping' for noise generators

http://filterforge.com/filters/5310.html is a snippet filter to turn each noise component into a planetary map of the filter. Wrap the resulting texture around a sphere, and you will have a sphere that looks like the given noise filter wrapped around it 'normally', the stretching to the sphere shape having been done before hand.

Would it be possible to create the 'Planetary Noise Snippet' math into the noise generation code? I would dearly love a toggle box on a noise component that explicitly makes the noise 'sphere wrapped'. Since "Planetary Noise Snippet" shows the math involved, hopefully a Boolean check box to push that math hard-coded in the system would reduce the complexity of creating more rich and detailed 'planet map' filters as well as the render time, since unnecessary portions of the snippet that get thrown away as part of the stretching process no longer need to be processed.

For extra bonus points, this I know is *NOT* trivial, and perhaps this could be a bonus for FF v4... Each noise component has 'details', including what variation of it. If it were trivial for me to generate a sphere stretched map of noise, it would be VERY cool if I could then give the filter a vector (Latitude, Longitude and zoom/ altitude) that would allow me to not only create a planet map based upon a selection of filters, but zoom in on that map for specific features. This has the benefit of allowing me to 'rotate' the noisy sphere ignoring poles and zoom in on a specific feature. I could then take this 'general height map' when I get to the desired surface area and run it through World-Machine by world-machine.com to add surface erosion and other surface features implied by the surface filter forge created.

World-Machine is great, but it has no means of supplying a sphere-bound noise... it's notion of a 'planet' is entirely flat and infinite. Filter Forge has better noise generation, and 'Planetary Snippet' points the way towards wrapping the noise to a sphere, but a 'planetary sphere' is simply too huge to apply World-Machine effects. Perhaps we can get a bridge between these two great products.

But at least getting 'Planetary Noise' coded into a toggle box on the noise components would really make my day.

Ok, thank you! I wouldn't get told 'no' unless I asked.