Bill DeWitt was saying something to the effect that...
>there is a utility,
>"orbcyl" or something, that can make a mesh from a HF in the shape of a
>sphere or a cylinder.
Orb-cyl is actually a pair of command line utilities, orb and cyl, written by John Beale, who also wrote the amazing HF-Lab height field utility. As indicated, orb displaces a height field onto a sphere, and cyl onto a cylinder. At the risk of crossing topic lines, here is the URL for John Beale's page:  Synthetic Landscapes.