In some embodiments, an image manipulation application receives a two-dimensional background image and projects the background image onto a sphere to generate a sphere image. Based on the sphere image, an unfilled environment map containing a hole area lacking image content can be generated. A portion of the unfilled environment map can be projected to an unfilled projection image using a map projection. The unfilled projection image contains the hole area. A hole filling model is applied to the unfilled projection image to generate a filled projection image containing image content for the hole area. A filled environment map can be generated by applying an inverse projection of the map projection on the filled projection image and by combining the unfilled environment map with the generated image content for the hole area of the environment map.