Very simply, you can't do what you're talking about using Max, except maybe through Shader Nodes. You can definately do it with Poser 5 and anything else that supports Pixar-style shaders.

Basically, what they did was use a sort've normal map, which they refer to as a detail map. Detail maps are, generally speaking, tiled textures that are over-rendered on top of the main texture at certain LOD distances to enhance realism. It's a very efficient way to add sub-details, but it requires using tiles.

My question is... why bother? You can make a detailed, high-resolution spheremap much more easily...

I think we misunderstood ourselves here. I'm not talking of the detail maps that make, for example, the mountains look sharper or make cities on surface. I'm talking of the very basic textures used to make the planet.

Example :
planet_gasblucld.txm

Textures:
gasblucldcap.dds
gasblucld01.dds
gasblucld02.dds

The maps can seamlessly be joined in that way : (S = Side, C = Cap)
---S
-S-C-S-C
---S

Problem is, how can I apply these 3 different textures to a single mesh? And how can I map these textures that fit as a box to fit a sphere seamlessly?

For further clarification Argh, this is for You-Know-What. That project i e-mailed you about

Ah...

Well, um... basically, Digital Anvil took triangles and mapped them just like any other triangles. There's no black magic involved here- their modelers just created some patterns on the surface of the models by mapping the tris whichever way they wanted the textures to go. It's a very time-consuming and painstaking method.

A much easier way to go about making planets for you-know-what would be to take and use my Pretty Planets experimental CMPs (which you will get to see in a much more refined state in the next Toolkit release) as the planetary models, using spheremapped objects instead of using tri-mapped approach DA used. Really, it's much easier to build new content this way- DA didn't do so because so few video cards had enough memory to support large-scale DDS files, which is no longer such a big issue...

Will do, and with pleasure. We have already rewritten the SPH format with an INI file approach (like many other things).