Stephen Tarheel

Guys and gals, I have a question that has been bugging me for awhile: I'm trying to use 3dcoat to prepare planet maps that'll be fed into GIS applications, so they need the equirectangular projection - aka a spherical projection. However to paint in 3dcoat I need to UV it. I can get close (but still distorted at the poles). I can accept this with a large number of polys on the sphere and do some reprojection tricks to fix the poles later (baking to an offset map)...but I'd rather not if there's a way to do it right in 3dcoat the first time. Thanks for any help!